Trump has dramatically shaken up up his frontline national security team just days after announcing a potentially groundbreaking diplomatic overture to North Korea. On Tuesday morning, the president unceremoniously dumped long-suffering Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who reportedly learned of his ouster via Trump's tweet), replacing him with loyal CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Trump is also promoting Gina Haspel, the CIA's deputy director, to lead the agency. She would be the first woman to helm the 70-year-old spy agency. Both positions are subject to Senate confirmation, but both Pompeo and Haspel are likely to be confirmed (although Pompeo's hearings might be a little rockier).

But the question begs: Why is Tillerson out? What caused this massive national security shakeup?

You can see it all in the president's praise of Pompeo: "Tremendous energy, tremendous intellect. We're always on the same wavelength. The relationship has been very good, and that's what I need from a secretary of state."

We're always on the same wavelength. This is key. From day one, Pompeo's refusal to break publicly with Trump, his willingness to vouch for his boss' often-maligned intelligence and credibility, and his corralling of the forces of the CIA's part of the "deep state" have given Trump pause to wonder whether Pompeo, who briefs Trump daily and sees him more often than Tillerson did, wouldn't be better as his chief diplomat.

Pompeo is Trump's kind of guy. He'll defend his boss no matter what. That sort of unquestioning loyalty has always been absolutely critical to Trump.

Tillerson, of course, hardly fit that mold.

The former ExxonMobil CEO famously called the president a "moron" after a meeting last summer — and then didn't really deny it. He has since spent the better part of the past six months playing a very small role in Trump's ego-centered policy process, Tillerson came to disagree with the president on matters large and small. As but one example, mere hours before his firing, Tillerson seemed to break with the president by blaming Russia for a nerve gas attack in England. ("White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had repeatedly declined to blame Russia for the nerve gas attack," as my colleague Peter Weber pointedly notes.)

Such things hardly escaped Trump's notice. "The Iran deal. I guess he thought it was okay. We were not really thinking the same," the president said.

But let's be honest. Really, it was the moron thing. That was the beginning of the end. If there is one thing our "very stable genius" of a commander in chief cannot stand, it's being insulted and undermined. There was simply no way Tillerson would last. In some ways, it's a wonder he lasted this long.

And so now America will have a new secretary of state, this one presumably more line-toeing and loyal.

What will Pompeo's State Department look like? When he faces the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he will surely be questioned by Democrats and Republicans alike about whether he will recapitalize the department, which has been vitiated under Tillerson. Whatever he says will not prove too much of an obstacle, however. The Senate will want Trump to have a full team in place before the start of serious negotiations with North Korea. They might also see Pompeo as someone who can gently nudge Trump from the ledge in terms of a draconian trade war.

Meanwhile, Haspel, a respected CIA insider, will face questions about her knowledge of the CIA's rendition, interrogation, and detention policies, and her willingness to speak truth to power, especially when it comes to Russia. She would oversee the country's covert response to Russian election meddling, after all, and her knowledge of the intelligence equities and sensitivities is probably deeper than Pompeo's. Trump is likely to be lauded by national security professionals for choosing her.

But moving forward, the lessons of Tillerson's rocky tenure should be obvious to all members of Trump's team: Don't cross the boss. He simply will not stand for it.

For 70 years, North Korea's Kim dynasty has tried to develop a military deterrent capable of fending off foreign invasion. The goal was always to legitimize its rule in the eyes of the world and to reunify the Korean peninsula on its terms. And for the past 30 years, the U.S. has tried to contain the Hermit Kingdom and stymie the potential for a nuclear breakout. Now, it seems North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, has decided to try a new approach, and President Trump has decided to play along.

On Thursday, South Korea's national security adviser announced Kim is eager to meet with Trump and talk denuclearization. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will accept the invitation, and the two would meet in the coming months.

What could possibly go awry? Here's what to watch for in the coming weeks and months as this story develops and the meeting details solidify — or deteriorate completely:

1. Will there be tit for tat?

After accepting the offer to meet, the U.S. has made it clear that its harsh sanctions against North Korea (which do seem to be having an effect) will remain in place until an agreement on denuclearization is reached. Does North Korea expect relief from sanctions in return for its agreement not to test its weapons while these peace-y games are being played? It has also agreed to tolerate America's combined military exercises with South Korea. If the U.S. does not respond in kind, will the North withdraw its offer?

2. What's the timeline?

How quickly do the talks happen? North Korea says they will happen in May, after the president of South Korea meets with Kim in the demilitarized zone. But that timetable seems awfully audacious; Trump might want to meet tomorrow, but he will face bureaucratic resistance to meeting anytime soon. My bet is that this meeting will happen later, rather than sooner.

3. What about the nukes?

What type of denuclearization is the U.S. willing to accept? What type should the U.S. be willing to accept? The U.S. intelligence community does not know whether Kim's nuclear engineers have mastered the complicated ballistic missile re-entry and targeting process, and there remains doubt about whether the North Koreans can build a warhead small enough to fit on the head of a missile. Is this where the hard line will be drawn? Can a country denuclearize without getting rid of its existing stockpile of nuclear material?

4. How will South Korea react?

Will South Korea insist on nuclear artillery disarmament first, as a precondition to talks about true open trade and even reunification? Because the threat to the U.S. comes from intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the threat to South Korea comes from conventional arms (and nuclear shells), will the U.S. and South Korea come to an agreement about what type of nuclear disarmament should happen first?

5. Is Trump's team behind him?

Does the prevailing view within the Pentagon and State Department — that talks about talks need to happen before the two sides can actually sit down — reassert itself? Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was caught off guard by the announcement, insisting Thursday that talks were far off. Trump had previously chastised him for bringing up the option of diplomacy with North Korea, so I can understand why he was gun-shy. It's hard to imagine that his humiliation at being completely subverted (albeit back to his own preferred policy) by the president will not result in some institutional pushback.

6. What are the political consequences for Trump?

Does this help Trump politically? The same guy who taunted Kim, who said he'd probably never talk to the guy, who heaped on preconditions that Kim could never accept, has just changed his mind, for the sake of winning the moment. And hey — it is a good thing that two leaders sit down and talk to each other, even without a roadmap. It will reduce tension. It will reduce the possibility of a nuclear accident and a misunderstanding. It will give South Koreans hope and reduce anxiety in Japan. The instinct to sit down with Kim, wherever it came from, is probably the right one. Trump is deeply unpopular and his party is suffering. If he gets to play peacemaker for a few months, or stretches it out until the midterms, he might win back some skeptics in the ranks.

It's been four days since the release of Rep. Devin Nunes' (R-Calif.) memo alleging that the FBI demonstrated anti-Republican bias in its handling of its surveillance of President Trump's former campaign adviser Carter Page. In the time since the memo's release, we've learned more about the politics and resiliency of our national security than anything else.

Our political system survived this unprecedented use of weaponized information by Congress. It landed with a thud, but not much of an echo. The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, did not resign, as it was rumored he might. Sources and methods of information were not disclosed, as was feared. The memo was injected into a news machine already determined to either validate it or tear it to shreds, so there was nothing enduring about its contents. A new memo, produced by opposition Democrats, could soon be released. Muddy waters get more muddy.

Within a few days, what might normally have been a recipe for a constitutional crisis washed away. This is a Trump era trend: Events that would normally be considered catastrophic to another administration seem just mildly surprising in this one. We raise our eyebrows. We don't scream. This may be because the velocity of news processing has caught up with the digital age. Or perhaps it boils down to the fact that Trump unleashes so many brickbats into the rituals of the old order that we are kind of immune to being viscerally shocked anymore.

The memo did not short-circuit the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, it landed amid reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was focusing on whether President Trump obstructed justice. But the memo doesn't advance the case for firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; it merely notes that he approved a request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil Page. A few Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have gone out of their way to make it clear that the memo should have no bearing on an evaluation of Rosenstein's ability to do his job. The president and his close allies, however, say Rosenstein has given Mueller carte blanche to go after matters unrelated to the Russia case, and Trump's cheerleaders in the media had hoped the memo would show that Rosenstein had willfully initiated the fishing expedition that is the source of Trump's anxieties.

But the memo fails here, too. Indeed, in attempting to tar the process by which the Page surveillance renewals were obtained, it had to acknowledge that what sparked the Russia investigation in the first place was a drunken claim by George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for Trump, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The memo did not entirely lack substance, but it is impossible to analyze its claims without a whole lot of additional information. It suggested that the FBI and the Justice Department did not reveal that Christopher Steele, the source of a dossier that the FBI was attempting to corroborate, was funded by Democratic opposition research dollars. To the uninitiated, that seems to be a real scandal, right? Shouldn't the FBI mention the potential motivation of a source of information alleging that the target of a FISA order had connections to a foreign government?

Turns out, it did. What the FBI did not have was corroborating evidence of the charges in the Steele dossier — so it's entirely possible that unverified information made it in to the FISA application. This is relevant, even though the FBI trusted Steele, and Steele trusted his informant. And it's the detail the entire memo's credibility hinges on. It also rests an elision: The memo quotes Andrew McCabe, then the deputy director of the FBI, as saying that the Steele dossier's information about Page was "essential" to the FISA application, but it does not say whether, by the time McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee, the FBI had corroborated some of Steele's claims. The memo implies, but specifically avoids saying, that without the Steele dossier, there would have been no surveillance on Page. It is possible that McCabe meant to say that information from the Steele memo had to be included in the FISA application in order for it to present a complete picture of what Page was up to.

Finally, there's this: By the time the third application for a surveillance warrant on Page rolled around, it was clear that the Steele dossier had been funded in part by Democrats. The FISA court chose to renew the warrant anyway.

The Nunes memo sparks more questions, more fodder for political tribalism, and more fuel for presidential tweeting. But it is far from being a slam dunk.

If you had any doubt that Republicans would try to distance themselves from President Trump's governing nihilism as they head into a daunting midterm election cycle, their efforts this week to declassify and publish a politically manufactured memo that alleges the FBI improperly surveilled a member of President Trump's campaign during the 2016 election should convince you otherwise.

It is hard to find historical parallels for this episode, and I've looked. There was the time when the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, led by Benjamin Wade, tried to force Abraham Lincoln's generals to divulge their plan for dealing with Robert E. Lee's Army, and resorted to a press leak in order to put pressure on the president. Or when that committee misleadingly used information to try to force Lincoln to replace Gen. George Meade after Gettysburg.

Then there was the battle for control of information after the Church Committee hearings (which investigated alleged abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS in the 1970s), when the CIA urged the White House not to divulge that the agency had been involved in a spate of assassination attempts throughout its young history. Instead of covering up the information, the White House chose a "political confrontation" over a legal one, as then-Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld said. The CIA's powers were weakened as a result.

But in these examples, at least, we see different parts of the government using classified information in order to preserve institutions, even to stabilize them, and to influence policy within an existing system of government. That is not what's happening with Republicans and the Nunes memo.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are part of a system they have now decided to pulverize because it's in the president's political interest to do so, and because their fortunes are tied to his. It is Trump's unique genius that he can govern like this, so effectively chaining Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian collusion and potential obstruction of justice to the political fortunes of a committee in Congress. The fruits of an alternative universe of facts and judgments are being willed into existence — a "Big Lie" that is propelled forward with a hashtag (#ReleaseTheMemo). It's all theater. Republicans created the memo based on intelligence facts that only some of them had seen. Their allies created the hashtag. Their media is providing momentum. And the conclusion is already known, at least in that universe: The FBI misled the FISA court by failing to disclose that Democrats paid for the explosive Steele dossier.

Here are the real-world consequences: The FBI cannot trust the president, who already mistrusts the FBI. The Justice Department is losing its ability to protect the FBI from political interference. National security secrets might be exposed. The FISA process might be upended or it might grind to a halt as the political system processes the fallout from the memo. The Mueller investigation loses a potentially valuable source of intelligence, assuming that Carter Page's wiretap musings were helpful. The FBI's core mission is compromised. Congress' ability to provide wise oversight is basically gone. Institutions — flawed ones — that nonetheless worked reasonably well and were the product of political compromises — are on their way to being destroyed.

I don't think President Trump has a problem with that. I don't think 35 percent of Americans have a problem with that. He ran to break the system; he's on the verge of cracking up a part of it that generally works for the benefit of the security of the country he swore to protect.

There is a whole body of activists on the left who also want to dismantle the FBI, to vitiate FISA, to denude the clothes of secrecy that have been used to justify national security misdeeds in the past. They want an end to terrorism prosecutions with pretexts, to FBI stings that persuade sad people to radicalize, to still-opaque government surveillance power. They leaked classified information and failed to accomplish their goals.

Such activists on the left are trying to stop the wheel. Trump and his GOP compatriots, on the other hand, seem intent on breaking it.

Watching President Trump attempt to navigate complex political issues reminds me of a crying child wobbling on the pony of a merry-go-round. His parents keep yelling at him to hold on to the pole. But the child is too scared, or too defiant, to listen. He just wants off.

Time and time again, Trump has made life difficult for himself. In short-circuiting a Pentagon process to decide how to integrate transgender troops, he has increased the chances that he will not get his way, assuming, indeed, that he wants to rid the military of every serving transgender person and prevent anyone who identifies as trans from serving in the future.

If he did bring clown genius powers of persuasion to the presidential campaign — and I'm not so convinced of that — the man has either lost his touch, or his ability to mold minds has collapsed under the weight of the stresses of the presidency.

He spectacularly misread the politics of his decision.

Yes, it's true that many evangelical Christians remain implacably opposed to transgender rights. A larger number of Americans might feel viscerally uncomfortable with transgender people. Soldiers are skeptical. A few "Christian leaders" at the top of the D.C. conservative lobbyist food pyramid need a solid win against cultural degenerates to convince their own flock that they remain relevant.

But within moments of Trump's tweets, three conservative Christian senators — Orrin Hatch of Utah, Richard Shelby of Alabama, and Joni Ernst of Iowa — said that Trump was wrong. All of them, in fact, said he was wrong in much the same way: "You ought to treat everyone fairly and give everyone a chance to serve," said Shelby. "Transgender people are people and deserve the best we can do for them," said Hatch. Ernst, a decorated veteran, asked a spokesperson to put it this way: "Americans who are qualified and can meet the standards to serve in the military should be afforded that opportunity."

Why? Keeping people who are already doing something from doing something because of who they are strikes us as a government-inflicted blow against their liberty, in much the same way as forcing someone to do something against their will does. If you think that bakers ought to have the right to refuse service to gay couples, you might find common cause with those who don't want to tear transgender people away from their commitment to the military.

Josh Barro has written that, broadly speaking, inclusion is popular; forcing change on people is not. In this he is channeling a vein of criticism aimed at Democrats, who underestimate the disruptive effects of inclusion-by-fiat, or the revulsion that campus deplatforming and speech policing evokes among people who aren't on college campuses. There is something to this, I suspect, but I also think that gender and sexuality are special cases. Americans do not seem to care in the main about the prospective mass deportation of immigrants, and more than 60 million of them voted for a man who explicitly promised to exclude people from the country because they were Muslim.

Even if candidate Trump's hyperbolic promises were attempts to pace his supporters and prepare them to accept much less when he became president, Americans seem enchanted by the politics of exclusion. Immigration politics is as wedded to policy as one can get, and while Americans say they support a pathway to citizenship and fair treatment, Republicans win on the issue because conservative anti-amnesty voters care more about the subject than everyone else. Want to know who's winning the culture war? Look at the polling, sure, but look at which side cares more. They're more motivated in every respect. And Americans, including the white voters who switched from Obama to Trump, don't seem to care much about transgender people. They don't think about them. They aren't threatened by them. So it may strike them as odd that the president has taken such a strident stance.

Even if Trump read the temper of the times correctly, his own actions still throw up an obstacle to their enactment. One reason why openly gay soldiers and sailors and airmen found a military culture that was quick to accept them is because President Obama held fast — often to the annoyance of gay rights activists — to a long deliberative process that allowed each objection to be raised and answered, and gave most stakeholders a voice. I don't know what Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants in his heart, but his decision to delay implementation of transgender integration demonstrated a faith in that process. (My personal sympathies are obvious, and fortunately, there is some evidence that the real world comports with my sensibilities.)

A few minutes after Trump tweeted, a White House official sent a preening justification to Axios' Jonathan Swan: "This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue. How will the blue collar voters in these states respond when senators up for re-election in 2018 like Debbie Stabenow are forced to make their opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?"

Wrong. Rust belt voters don't care. Blue-collar voters aren't as maliciously ignorant as this official seems to think. And Debbie Stabenow has nothing to defend.

Fresh takes in the Trump administration have the tendency to quickly curdle, especially as the extraordinary becomes the new ordinary and the media struggles to find the language to communicate to the American people the gravity and consequence of each decision made by President Trump. To counter this effect, we can look for patterns.

When deployed correctly, cold, hard, indisputable patterns can be very telling. Here is a pattern I've noticed that emerges when the Trump White House does something extraordinary, as in the case of the sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday:

Whatever outlandish decision Trump has made, the story put out by the White House to explain it often chokes over its own incoherence within mere hours.

When the White House tries to change the subject, the subject becomes the story and quickly boomerangs.

Because Trump has no natural constituency inside of Washington, he faces an unusually large blowback from all corners. This feeds his paranoia that official Washington, including the dominant media, is against him.

Trump's team, desperate for approval by the leviathan they hate, seems genuinely perplexed to never be given the benefit of the doubt. They do not to understand that a reflexive distrust of Trump's actions is the first step towards understanding them.

This pattern lends itself to the following conclusion: Trump is his own worst enemy.

If the goal in firing Comey was to move on from the investigation into the Trump campaign's potential collusion with Russia ahead of the 2016 election, that goal was kneecapped as soon as the president released a letter pointedly, directly, and unashamedly linking his own animus towards Comey to the Russia investigation even though the point of the letter was to undercut that very claim.

"While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation," Trump wrote in his termination letter to Comey, "I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not all to effectively lead the Bureau."

What is more unnerving: A president who is this oblivious to his own obliviousness? A staff that cannot convince him to remove such a self-damaging sentence? Or the removal of the director himself? It is hard to say.

To be sure, like Trump, Comey has no constituency in Washington outside of the bureau, some prosecutors, and a good mass of national security commentators who respect his integrity. And the White House seems to have sensed an opportunity to pounce on Comey last week, when he delivered a lengthy and ill-digested account of his Solomonic decision-making during the campaign while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the opposition to Comey's political decisions during the campaign did not abrogate a corresponding faith in his ability to be an independent check on the president's own recklessness. Yeah, he's sanctimonious. Sure, he might have cost Hillary Clinton the election. But his own imperviousness to sounder political judgments demonstrated, in a weird way, his significant power.

What happens now? The pressure to appoint a special prosecutor is growing. If Trump worried that the FBI was getting too close to the truth about his Russia connections (less likely) or simply felt the FBI was becoming a generator of instability, drama, and power (more likely), he will not know how to handle an independent counsel who has subpoena power and doesn't take kindly to presidential tweets. His firing of James Comey may have hastened the hour when he will have to reckon with a potentially greater threat to his standing and stature than Comey ever was.

You could see it in the president's face as he listened to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explain the strong bonds that tie our two countries together.

You could see it at Mar-a-Lago, during an impromptu appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Shinto Abe.

You can see it, actually, every time Trump appears in public. He seems exhausted — and miserable.

You can hear it, too. When you're tired, you revert to stock phrases and canned responses. During the Trudeau press conference, Trump was asked four easy questions, and his answers grappled for coherence (even more than usual). On Syrian refugees potentially entering the United States, he strung together a bunch of phrases about immigration and ended with a signature (and weakly delivered) note of self-praise.

Trump seems utterly exhausted and just plain miserable. His staff is also surely miserable. Many do not like him. More importantly, they don't trust him. They don't trust Stephen Bannon to translate his core hunches into policy, with only a few exceptions. They compete for Trump's affections by throwing each other under whatever buses might be rolling by. They leak to their favorite reporters.

The president borrows his temperament from A Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius J. Reilly. He craves spontaneity and stimulation, lives in a world of his own imagining, and is also beset by anxiety and germophobia.

But being the president means that he is not, in fact, in a world he can create. He can't tame his schedule, which is intense — purposefully so, because his staff wants to create the impression that he is working hard, and fast, to keep his promises. He can't decide who he talks to, and when, and gets reproached every time he seems to speak his mind.

There were no adoring crowds feeding his energy when he allegedly hung up on the prime minister of Australia, or when he had to listen to a lecture by German President Angela Merkel about the Geneva Convention. Certainly, the decision to cut ties with erstwhile National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was greeted not with cheers, but by pitchfork-wielding mobs of critics.

For a president who craves adulation and praise, the presidency has him drowning in misery.

This misery might matter less if the president and his staff shared a purpose that was ennobling. But that purpose — total disruption, the creation of the media as an enemy state — is inherently unstable. It's a poor man's gloss on a real governing philosophy.

Americans by the tens of thousands — and perhaps hundreds of thousands — tuned in Tuesday to a dense one hour and eight minutes of legal and policy arguments about President Trump's executive order on immigration. The grainy audio served as a civics lesson for the digital age.

On Thursday evening, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals gave America's 45th president a civics lessons of his own, ruling 3-0 to uphold the suspension of Trump's unilateral order that tried to keep refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Our president's response: raging in all-caps on Twitter.

Here are some key lessons and implications:

1. The decision was unanimous. One of the judges were appointed by a Republican, and two appointed by Democrats. There is no substantive argument to make that their ruling was small-p political.

2. The ruling was, however, large-P Political — a stinging slap-down of President Trump's efforts to influence or intimidate the judiciary — as much as it was a direct rejection of his assertion that the executive branch has virtually untrammeled authority to control who and how people get into the country.

3. The text of the decision includes citations from Trump advisers. This means, in essence, that everything Trump's advisers say about how policy gets made in the Trump administration is fair game for scrutiny.

4. The text of the decision includes Trump's own words about a Muslim ban. This means that everything Trump had said or will say about this policies is fair game for scrutiny.

5. The court looked at the merits of the argument, which means that, according to legal commentators, they wrote their opinion with an eye toward the Supreme Court, which seems like the ultimate destination for this fight.

6. The court did not cite public opinion, nor did it reference the massive protests against Trump's order. (They did mention the confusion at airports.) This suggests that they did not want to create the impression that they bent to the public outcry.

7. The decision will still fortify the Trump resistance, especially the activist groups who are organizing their entire business models around his policy decisions. I've already seen several memes online suggesting that the popular uprising worked, and that it should continue. Whether or not the demonstrations actually influenced the judges, the resistance movement will assume that, at the very least, their protests did not hurt the cause.

8. The Justice Department asked the court to lift the stay because it was "overbroad," but also (and primarily) because they believe the president has an inherent, broad power to determine what constitutes a national security threat. The scope of such power, the Justice Department asserted, is basically non-justiciable, absent extraordinary circumstances. Trump's DOJ lawyers effectively argued that Judges shouldn't second-guess the president's national security decisions.

The 9th Circuit disagreed.

"Although we owe considerable deference" to the executive branch on this matter, it is "beyond question that the judges have the authority to adjudicate constitutional questions on executive actions," the court wrote.

9. This argument between branches isn't new; it served as the point of debate for many cases that President Obama fought against the ACLU and other plaintiffs during his two terms. But Trump gives these disagreements a new dimension. His carelessness with the facts, his bullying, and his hectoring has now been used against him. His words and actions are responsible for the overreach and for the set of facts that caused the judges to assert their power.

No doubt President-elect Donald Trump will face his share of unexpected procedural hiccups as he begins his four-year term on Jan. 20.

Doubtless, too, that his focus at the start of his term will not be the focus at the end of it. Events tend to change what a president can do.

Last Wednesday, Trump offered a smorgasbord of proposals, some of them specific, some of them vague. Given his campaign rhetoric, these will be easy for opponents to caricature: Mass deportations! Millions losing health care immediately! Trade wars!

The reality is that the pace of change, even at the speed of Trump, will slow considerably as it strains through the grind of Washington. The press will not let up in its newly found, if somewhat tarnished, role as truth-teller. The gaps and inconsistencies in his policy proposals, which were back-seated to coverage of his personality and professional history, will become more salient. And Trump might pretend to ignore the equally-as-tarnished opinion polls, but if he is human, he will pay close attention to them.

He has several gating ideas: He'll protect workers, clean up Washington, and restore law and order.

Trump will want a major victory early. A successful Supreme Court nominee, from a list he has already provided, might give him breathing room with conservatives who mistrust him, as will the inevitable fevered, ultimately futile opposition from Democrats. Their opposition to his political appointees will be as implacable as Republican opposition was to President Obama's, and Democrats will be under intense pressure from their base to try and disrupt any traction that Trump might generate from early and easy confirmations.

The new president will need more to generate real momentum: a big domestic policy accomplishment. In the abstract, he can count on the support of his entire party. On a concrete level, he might find that Republicans cut from a different part of the cloth will offer him surprising resistance. His mandate might not be theirs. He might decide on something that commands majority support from a cross-section of Americans. He is fickle that way.

Repealing and replacing ObamaCare will take a while. Some provisions of the bill haven't kicked in yet, and the Affordable Care Act's reach extends to dozens of government agencies, and into state governments. It has metastasized; it cannot be extricated from the body politic like a benign tumor. A number of Republicans want ObamaCare to slowly starve itself to death, exhausting the available supply of governments funds over the course of several years. Its protections remain widely popular and the prospect of many of Trump's own voters going without health insurance will slow down the pace of reform, perhaps considerably. By the end of next year, the American health care system will look a lot different than it does now. How Trump gets rid of ObamaCare while keeping his promise to cover everyone is a mystery at the moment.

In theory, it will be easy, with command of Congress and the White House, to pass a budget. Republicans will roll over and deal with the deficits that Trump's proposals will create because the GOPers overwhelmingly favor the huge tax cuts that will accompany them. But what if that budget contains significant new spending for infrastructure projects? Many House Republicans will face significant pressure to fight against government spending tooth and nail. Senate Republicans will chafe against Medicaid cuts, which would hurt the poor.

On immigration, Senate Republicans already support spending money to build a border wall; they've been appropriating it for years under President Obama. But the predicate to that, which Trump has established in hints, is a more comprehensive immigration plan that could generate support from Democrats in offering a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It is not clear that the votes are there. Similarly, although he can ask Congress to cut funding for "Sanctuary Cities" — which protect undocumented immigrants by policy — it would pass only as a standalone bill. When merged with Trump's more controversial proposals, it becomes a bargaining chip.

Trump wants to establish term limits on members of Congress. That's a non-starter, even if Congress reads the election tea leaves the way that Trump does. Other proposals to "drain the swamp" — including bans on foreign lobbying and measures to curtail special interest influence over politicians — could sail through.

Some of his plans might draw support from unusual allies. Bernie Sanders pledged to renegotiate bad trade deals and to officially label China a currency manipulator. Many Democrats, and some Republicans, support both of those actions. But most conservatives remain enthusiastic free traders.

So much depends on how Trump gets along with Paul Ryan, assuming the Wisconsin Republican remains speaker of the House. They share some concerns — the size of government and infrastructure investment are two — but their minds diverge elsewhere. Ryan and Trump have profoundly different approaches to criminal justice reform, for example.

And both will be held accountable to vastly different publics. Their interests might overlap simply in the vein of both wanting to do something, and in the need that both have to show that they can work together. Will Ryan, who represents the swamp that Trump wants drained, feel empowered if he retains his speakership? How much of a mandate will Trump claim?

Republicans may well come to understand that Trump won because Hilary Clinton lost (indeed, she was, in the end, a more popular candidate). As much as they need Trump's voters — and the anger of those voters — to sustain their political careers, they will be aware of its limits.

After their stunning failure to accurately predict the results of the presidential election, the press, pollsters, pundits, and political consultants are all due a ferociously and meticulously conducted autopsy. That will take time.

There are some early lessons to learn. But our rumination and recrimination, the hubris of self-pity, of the need for certainty in an uncertain time, will push us in unproductive directions, too. It would be easy to learn the wrong lessons. Let's focus on learning the right ones instead. For instance:

Wrong lesson: Don't believe the polls. The data is too skewed.

Right lesson: Don't trust only in polls. Data is valuable, but imperfect and contingent on our assumptions more than we want to believe.

Not even the Republican Party's internal targeting mathematics envisioned a universe in which white women with college degrees voted for Donald Trump at the rates they did, or that Democratic turnout in cities would be insufficient to overwhelm the turnout from rural and exurban white voters.

Think of it like this: If you're asked to describe the contents of a box, it helps to know its weight, volume, and size. Shake it a little. How does it sound?

This is what pollsters do. They use increasingly refined models to guess the box's dimensions. But if we're just totally wrong about the dimensions of the box, or if we hope the box contains a diamond when it in fact it contains a pumpkin, those errors will throw everyone off.

Apply that to the election. Pollsters' models reflect a consensus about the way the world works, or in this case, the "feel" of politics.

I've always felt that the divide between pundits and data journalists was artificial. Both operate off of educated guesses based on the consensus, their own mental shortcuts, their partisan predilections, and even their wishes. Some find more comfort in hard numbers than they should. Usually, we are too quick to extrapolate based on an anecdote.

Pollsters and pundits got the basics right. They understood that working-class whites would vote for Donald Trump by significant margins, that Hispanic and black voters would overwhelmingly favor Hillary Clinton, that the gender gap would be significant, and that Clinton would do well in cities and Trump would do better outside of them. The polls correctly assessed the magnitude of Clinton's support among millennial voters, and of Trump's support among older voters. Adjusting assumptions a few degrees in either direction, and pollsters would be crowing — rather than eating it.

The bottom line is this: Silly forecasts based on abstract models should be out. More contingent, measured analysis has a place at the table.

Wrong lesson: Technology disrupts the quest for the truth.

Right lesson: Technology is truth-agnostic.

For months, analysts knew for certain that technology enabled people to see only what they wanted to see and reinforce their own points of view. Facebook, in particular, transmitted false information more quickly than Macedonian tweetbots could disseminate it, and more widely than any Russian propagandist could ever dream.

Technology companies have become primary sources of misinformation. They don't generate the news, though, and they don't generate the preferences that predispose people to believe it. They exacerbate — even "weaponize" — the effect of these filter-bubbles, and we can, and should, urge companies with a sense of civic responsibility to reform.

But Facebook isn't the cause of our political polarization any more than Airbnb is the cause of the housing crunch in cities. Forcing people to hear outside these echo chambers is really hard because that's not what people are inclined to do by nature.

Sometimes, as President Obama likes to say, change happens in increments. Sometimes, it's like a speeding train that came from nowhere.

Sometimes, in the same body, the proteins that code for magnanimity and tolerance and open-mindedness are overwhelmed by those that churn out anxiety-bugs, member-berries, stomach knots, and bundles of resentment.

A bunch of people say they saw this coming. I didn't. And in victory, winners always look smarter, and in defeat, losers always look dumber.

But to put it plainly: There were a lot of votes that Hillary Clinton could have gotten, and should have gotten, and didn't. Now Donald Trump will be the next president.

Why?

It's a really complicated story. As I write this, I'm looking at data showing how Hillary Clinton fared worse than President Obama in places where he was strong — her largest deficits, in fact, came from his strongholds.

Two years ago, as Clinton was still making up her mind about whether to run, I sat down in Los Angeles with one of her closest friends, someone who has known her since her White House days. This friend assumed that Clinton would run, and that Republicans would nominate its most electable conservative — perhaps Marco Rubio. Clinton could win, her friend said, but her party has a huge blind spot: It was hemorrhaging white voters, particularly those outside of urban areas, and didn't have a strategy to keep them.

This adviser's biggest fear was that the party's turn toward identity politics, and its self-conscious embrace of the majority-minority coalition that is ascendant in America, had pushed out of its tent a large number of white people. Non-white people are now part of the establishment, and there is a sense among whites, perhaps not entirely without merit, that the multi-racial establishment went out of its way to assert its superiority. To put it another way: Angry whites are tired of being told that they're racist. Or that, because they oppose immigration, that they're anti-Latino. Or that, because they grew up with more traditional gender roles, that they're sexist. The point here is not that these perceptions are grounded in a reality; it's that they exist, and the Democratic Party has done nothing to counter them. The cognoscienti thinks these ideas are foggy.

Now, these white voters say they're motivated by economics. They believe that trade deals have kicked them to the curb. They think that the economic elites oversell the benefits of trade and undersell the harsh realities of job displacement. They think ObamaCare was a raw deal, and that it took money away from them and redistributed it to people who don't deserve it. But the reality is this: They are not poorer than they were; they are not more exposed to the downside of trade than anyone else; and their anger is usually expressed in language that speaks more to culture than material concerns. For years — decades — they've been uncomfortable with the creeping universalism of the elites, and with immigration that dilutes what they think is a common set of values. This year, enough of them voted.

The pundit herd has been bleating about "working-class white vote" for years. We've had arguments about what motivates them, what repels them, how they're handling the shift from a service economy to an information economy, how they're dealing with the anxieties that immigration produces, and how conscious they are that their country is becoming more brown and yellow and less white. We haven't figured out how to solve their problems. (Maybe those problems aren't solvable.)

"White working-class voters just decided to vote like a minority group," tweeted Nate Cohn, the data guru for The New York Times. These voters accounted for more than 40 percent of the electorate. They gave Donald Trump the overwhelming majority of their vote, eclipsing by double digits the margin they gave to Mitt Romney. Pollsters assumed they'd count for about 33 percent.

These voters — white voters without a college degree — tend to be what we condescendingly call low-information voters, which means that they tend not to pay attention to policy details and pay more attention to how candidates make them feel.

The echo chamber created by the new media landscape has turned them into highly-misinformed voters, and they could grow their numbers and fortify themselves without having to formally affiliate with a party, or declare themselves as a member of a group.

We kind of saw this coming — the elites. We did. We've known that, for example, fake news gets reshared on Facebook at a horrifying rate, and that a large minority of Republicans surveyed bought specious lies about President Obama. We just didn't envision an election where enough of them would vote. Our view of the world we live in, and what motivates people around us, is not the right view.

The media, which likes to be on the right side of history, thought the story of this election would be that Latino voters were woken from their slumber by Donald Trump's blatant xenophobia. This would propel Clinton to victory in states like Florida. We could not envision the possibility that a man who has no business being president by any conventional standard would been chosen by a plurality, or, majority of the American electorate.

We did not see another possibility, because our mental models did not (or would not) account for another possibility: That, as Josh Greenman of the New York Daily News put it in a tweet: "There was a scary sense in which this whole year, it felt a little like we were reading history in reverse."

Donald Trump has pulled off the unthinkable and won the American presidency, multiple media outlets are projecting. Anyone who tries to explain the 2016 presidential election in a tweet, or even a column, will capture only a fraction of the story.

Now that that's out of the way, here are my four theories of the case.

1. White people woke up. People who thought that everything Obama represents is an existential threat to them. White people who were not reliable Republican voters, but who felt totally abandoned by the powers that be. Exurban whites. Rural whites.

2. Hillary Clinton couldn't cut it. An eminently qualified candidate could not rise above 30 years of being Hillary Clinton, and could not figure out how to effectively counter persistent doubts about her credibility, including some she sowed herself. She didn't get all the votes she could have gotten.

3. Technology. It is now possible for the disenfranchised to fight back, to give to the establishment that looks down upon them a middle finger, and to do it in a way that the establishment cannot perceive. Technology has been an unheralded magnifier of Donald Trump's support.

4. Restrictions on voting. It has been an open secret that the GOP has done everything it can, legally and politically, to reduce the ability of minorities to vote in presidential elections. Twenty states made it harder to vote since 2006.

Put these four suppositions together, and you begin to explain how we live in a world that can elect Barack Hussein Obama twice as president, a world that still supports his policies, and then turn around and elect an openly bigoted billionaire businessman from New York to be his successor.

Nothing makes the political world lose its gravity as much as gyrations in polls during the final few weeks of a presidential race.

But if we let social scientists serve as psychological balms for our collective panic, we find that a large degree of that uncertainty can be accounted for by errors that humans make, by methodological traumas inherent to polling, and by differences in how likely certain groups of voters are to respond to pollsters when their candidates suffer through a bad news cycle.

It seems logical that Hillary Clinton would suffer in the polls if a negative event, like the FBI director's letter to Congress about her emails, dominates news coverage. It is not logical. It is, in fact, a classic example of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. For one thing, there is no actual proof that a large enough cohort of undecided voters is going to shift their preferences at this late a date because they're reminded of Clinton's email scandals.

For another, this type of explanation filters out everything else that's going on, including slower-developing, but more plausible drivers in voter preferences. It also ignores a quite obvious and well-studied phenomenon in polling: News events change the inclination of committed but less partisan voters to respond to pollsters. Simply put: If your candidate has a bad news cycle, you aren't as likely to be as enthusiastic about your vote, and you're less likely to respond to a pollster, or to be honest with a pollster about your partisan or ideological affinities.

This is what's known as "differential non-response," and it's one of the biggest issues that survey takers have to deal with this close to an election. It turns out that, for a variety of reasons, it's much easier to get certain demographic groups to respond to a pollster's telephone call, regardless of the circumstance. If you're a white woman over the age of 50, you are more likely to respond to a pollster than if you are black, or Hispanic, or a millennial. Pollsters try to control for this in their weighting, but their sample sizes are often so small that tiny changes compound error rates.

Second: There are fewer pollsters conducting fewer state polls than before, which means that there is more variation across the average of these polls. Small fluctuations — essentially random fluctuations — seem larger than they are. Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics, notes that "if the polls are coming slowly, where we only have three to five polls in an average at a time, the swings are going to look wild." FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten found this troubling statistic: "From [a] month before election to nine days before it, we had 80 live interview polls in 2012 in 10 states closest to national vote. In 2016? Thirty-six."

Add to these layers of uncertainty two more facts:

1. Over time, the percentage of Americans who say they would participate in polls has declined significantly, from nearly one out of three in 1997 to one in 10 in 2016, according to Pew.

2. Half of American households don't even have landlines. The younger you are, the less likely you are to have ever used a telephone with a cord attached to it.

Again, pollsters try to correct for these skews by weighting and finding other ways to sample voters. But every interpolation creates additional room for error, quite apart from the survey's statistical "margin of error."

The beating heart of this election turned tachycardic today, simply because a federal law enforcement official fulfilled a basic obligation of his office.

Every communication medium is subject to our cognitive biases and self-imposed bubbles. But the collective media freak-out over FBI Director James Comey's notification to Congress that his agency has come across new emails "pertinent" to its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server is an object lesson in how we, as consumers and producers of media, can screw with our own heads at the expense of common sense.

Comey took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He did not take an oath to follow best practices for preventing mass media freak-outs, or to consult the political calendar before deciding when to amend his testimony, or to prevent the stock market from gyrating. Likewise, he did not promise to subject himself to praise from the news media for his stellar grasp of optics.

Indeed, if he made any mistake, it was that his statement was too vague. "Irresponsible," said The Huffington Post's Sam Stein.

Why? It allowed Republicans to play semantic games about investigations being "reopened." Democrats lost their nerve, as they tend to do. Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta called it "extraordinary that we would see something like this 11 days before an election."

Extraordinary, yes. Potentially damaging to Clinton? Of course. The email scandal, as small potatoes as it has turned out to be, is one reason Americans say they don't trust her. When the public's attention is drawn to Clinton because of the email issue, it does not redound to her benefit. I get why the Clinton team feels burned, here. The email issue is still hot.

"The director owes it to the American people to provide full details of what he is now examining," Podesta's statement read.

Does he? In point of fact, no. Not really. He does not owe Clinton the courtesy of putting her political interests before his legal obligations.

As for the public: yes. What the FBI director says about a presidential candidate in the days before an election automatically becomes the only thing that people will talk about. It should be axiomatic that if he must say something, then, he should say it carefully, and with due regard for the political realities. His investigations ought to be above politics; his words are political, regardless of whether he wants them to be.

Comey had a duty to inform Congress if the FBI developed information about the case that was at odds with his testimony on September 28. So he did.

Why was his statement so vague? He has no duty to be specific in a way that compromises an active investigation. That's a first principle.

So perhaps he chose vagueness instead of specificity because specificity might have created even more of a mess.

Reporting is an active endeavor. Passively conveying Comey's statement without (a) the context of his legal obligation to notify Congress and (b) an effort to determine what the substance of the new information is … well, whatever it is, it wasn't reporting.

Here we have to speculate. In the course of determining whether Anthony Weiner exchanged sexually explicit texts with a 15-year-old girl, agents obtained devices used by Weiner. Weiner is separated from his wife Huma Abedin, Clinton's longtime personal aide and close friend. Because devices belonging solely to Abedin would not ordinarily be subject to a subpoena unless there was probable cause to believe that they had been used to commit a crime — the crime being Weiner's in the case — we don't know whose devices the FBI found new emails on.

But they did find something. Perhaps they were emails about the Clinton private email server. Perhaps they were forwarded email chains from the State Department that contained new messages the investigators hadn't seen before. Perhaps they were something else.

The media collectively decided it knew exactly what Comey's motives were; he had been stung by internal criticism of his decision not to recommend charges against Clinton, and so he was somehow trying to give his bureau adversaries a life-line; or he was trying to make amends with a Republican majority in Congress that would still control his funding after Nov. 8, or that he was interjecting himself into the election because he must have found something big and wanted to make sure his butt was covered.

I don't know what his motives are; I know what his legal obligations are. He seems to be following them. As a voter, that's all I need to know.

How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? If you're a journalist, do you frame his latest outrage through its effect on the campaign or the country?

For instance, each of the following two frames about his "rigged election" talk could have easily appeared in media across the United States. Both are useful for journalists — but only one is essential.

Frame one: Donald Trump warned supporters that the presidential election was rigged against him and urged them to be extra-vigilant against voter fraud. He implied he wouldn't accept the results of an election that he did not win.

Frame two: Donald Trump threw the legitimacy of an American presidential election in doubt, claiming, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that big media, liberal Democrats, and the Republican establishment were conspiring against him. His words will give his supporters ammunition to challenge the results, and perpetuate his grievance-fueled campaign.

Let's call the first frame "the game frame," after Thomas E. Patterson, the Harvard political scientist who noticed that the media, after the 1960s, covered the election like a contest, because it was easy, cheap, and rewarding for them to do so. In the game frame, the governing metaphor is logically consistent only within a very short time frame, one that the digital news landscape has compressed to mere days, sometimes a single day. The game frame is useful because it allows journalists to avoid offending the pieties of its audience, who are influenced, more and more, by a self-reinforcing cacophony of digital detritus and commentary. But the game frame is fundamentally agnostic about which is right. It avoids conclusions and judgments because its metaphors impoverish the vocabulary its native speakers can use.

The other — the "real" frame — assumes a reality anchored by a set of facts. Its time horizon is an entire election cycle. Its governing principle is not a metaphor or a contest; it is, simply, a set of norms about which everyone agrees to agree, when all is said and done.

These two frames have always been present in campaign coverage, usually in healthy competition with each other. Presidential candidates could spar about tax policy, but they always released their tax returns, because transparency was a norm.

Presidential candidates had character flaws and made mistakes in life, and acidly zinged each other during debates, but they usually acknowledged the dignity of the office during their races and struggled with decisions about how low to go. Moral sensibility was a norm.

Presidential candidates spawned from different movements and with different levels of experience and knowledge, but nominees possessed a minimal set of qualifications and a basic knowledge about the world. Being temperate was a norm.

In the past, strong institutions, the political parties, the media, and even the expressed conviction of a majority of voters all enforced these norms.

This is one reason why American presidential elections have been remarkably competitive.

Even media bias was often self-correcting; perhaps the cosmopolitan sensibilities of journalists gave short shrift to the pain and anxieties of conservatives, but the fear of being seen as biased, the economic pressure to maintain ratings and increase advertising dollars, and the he-said/she-said norms of political reporting negated the effect of intentional anti-Republican prejudice.

In the past, there has been overlap between these frames, too. The presidential candidates cared about satisfying the demands of both of them, and voters punished those who simply ignored reality. In the modern era, populist insurgents, outliers, gadflies, and hecklers have also populated our politics, but the reality frame kept them from interfering in the process of an orderly transition of power itself.

Our consumption of media has changed. Narratives are not as powerful as they were, which means that longer time frames simply loom less large in our field of view. We give more weight to moments and less weight to cycles. This point shouldn't be overlooked: One reason why the game frame seems so powerful is that we tend to live digitally in moments as much as our brains think in stories. We simply want to feel, to eat those Member Berries. Douglas Rushkoff, the poet laureate of modern media literacy, calls this "present shock."

Republicans set themselves up for a candidate who, through the force of his personality, could trigger conservative erogenous zones — while eschewing every other norm — and delight the id of enough of their voters. They did this knowingly. Their complicity is as galling as it is obvious.

I am happy to say, though, that the reality principle is fighting back, little by little. We are re-arming our norms.

When The Huffington Postadded a disclaimer about Donald Trump to its stories, I thought they were more precious than prescient. I was wrong; they were right. Truth-telling chyrons became an actual thing, too.

During the past half year, the language of news analyses, usually the way to express an opinion in the news hole, has become common in the major metropolitan dailies. Hedges are becoming less frequent. Content-heavy, serious satire shows (Samantha Bee's, John Oliver's) are influencing newsrooms as much as The New York Times' A1 choices used to influence the rundown of the evening news.

The comeback has been led by the avatars of legacy journalism.

The New York Times was at the top of its game reporting on Donald Trump's ill-conceived university.

The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold has brought a new level of transparency to his reporting about the Clinton foundation and Trump's charities — and, of course, he broke the story about Trump's sexual braggadocio caught on tape. It was encouraging to me that the Post's lawyers took only five hours to vet that scoop. They are adjusting, too, to the new reality.

BuzzFeed has been doing good political journalism for so long that I consider it a legacy institution. Its own K-File unit adapted very quickly to the moment-to-moment news cycle, and the journalism its produced has been worth the money CNN probably paid to acquire them.

When journalists are diffident to the truth, the public senses our diffidence. When we champion truth, the public senses our confidence.

My advice to young journalists: Leave the game frame to the amateurs. Build credibility by adopting the reality frame. Tell people what you know.

Donald Trump has insulted reality too often, and his loss — and he will lose — should fortify truth-tellers everywhere.

Donald Trump is right. American elections are rigged. But he's wrong about the rigging, the riggers, and the victims.

Trump says that the media, the Republican Party, and unnamed groups are conspiring to somehow predetermine the results of the presidential vote on Nov. 8.

He means to suggest more than just that illegitimate votes will be counted, or that nefarious community organizers in inner cities will try to somehow... he really doesn't actually specify a predicate, but that's probably because he has no idea how elections really work.

The truth is much messier. Let's leave aside, for now, the efforts by Russia to sway the election in favor of Trump. That target is too easy, and it doesn't take Trump's arguments seriously.

A full and fair election means one where voting standards are uniform, where every person who wants to vote can do so easily, where all votes are counted equally, where mistakes made by voters and election officials are adjudicated properly.

Article II of the Constitution ensures that such an election is impossible.

It grants to the states the right to choose the "times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives," and gives to Congress and the executive branch a limited menu of powers to regulate the actual balloting that takes place in presidential elections. Each state (plus Washington, D.C.) decides what type of ballot it wants to use. States determine when voters can register, where they can register, and how they can register. They determine, with some oversight from courts enforcing federal civil rights laws, whether certain classes of people can vote more easily than others.

Elections, as a consequence, are very messy. The uncertainties introduced by the 51 different sets of election codes are one reason why. One example: In some states, signatures on mail-in ballots must match signatures kept on file by states. In other states, they don't. Disparities create noise; noise creates uncertainty; uncertainty creates the impression of different standards; different standards create the perception of imbalance.

Another reason is that Republicans have taken the initiative to make it harder for black people to vote. This statement might seem like it would require a whole paragraph's worth of evidence. Fortunately, the unanimous ruling by the Fourth Circuit overturning the North Carolina state legislature's effort to limit voter identification is sadly sufficient.

A third reason is that voter fraud does exist, albeit at miniscule levels. Trump's admonitions to supporters assume that such fraud consists of people impersonating others in person. For some reason, they assume that minorities are willing to perpetrate this fraud at the instigation of the Democratic Party. But Trump's just wrong. In-person voter fraud is among the rarest of rare birds. Absentee voter shenanigans are far more common, although they are not common enough, or frequently committed enough, to sway elections on scales exceeding those of a small town or precinct. Wars between Republican governors and their allies in state legislatures, on the one hand, and an increasingly agitated federal judiciary, on the other, have kept election statues in flux during the past a decade.

Democrats might genuinely conspire to make it easier for people to vote, for them to register to vote, and for their votes to count if they are not properly cast. I don't really see that as a problem; it is not the party's fault that their voters have been the victims of deliberate disenfranchisement in the past.

Indeed, it's the voters, not Donald Trump, who are the victims of our election.

About half of eligible American voters do not actually vote. Many still find it hard to discover where their polling places are. Others are influenced by the perception that their votes won't count. Often, as was the case in the presidential primaries, their votes didn't — provisional balloting is in a state of chaos, too.

When Donald Trump implies to his voters that their votes won't count because the game is rigged against them, he is, in fact, creating a new link in that chain. He is self-iterating the rigging. The only real way to rig an election is to deny the obvious result and try to change it by means that transcend the election. Delegitimizing the process is a great way to do that.

On Monday, a group of hackers dubbing themselves the Shadow Brokers took to the web with an audacious offer: For 1 million bitcoin, they would hand over an archive of potent computer cracks they hinted had come from inside the National Security Agency.

To prove that their bounty was real, they shared several examples. These included programs that, if executed correctly, would allow programmers to connect to far-afield computers, bore deep holes through virtual firewalls, and steal secrets without leaving so much as a spare bit behind.

As companies like Cisco scrambled to test the exploits, the security community responded with incredulity and alarm: Had the NSA been hacked? Was there yet another mole, a new Edward Snowden, who had walked out of the agency with a thumb-drive full of classified source code?

The answer, according to Snowden himself, and at least one of the intelligence officials assigned to protect the agency's secrets after his leaks agrees, is that a nation-state — probably Russia — covertly hijacked an internet node used to help manage the agency's empire of intelligence-collecting implants in computers across the globe. That — or there's a new mole.

In the weeks and months after Snowden's disclosures began to shake loose the agency's secrets, teams within the intelligence community scrambled to assess the damage and salvage as many tools and capabilities as they could.

One urgent task: Shore up vulnerabilities in the way that the NSA's hackers — specialists, engineers, and scientists working in the Remote Operations Center (ROC) inside of the agency's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division — interacted with their intelligence targets — usually computers and servers — across the globe. Snowden's documents showed that the NSA could break into a number of popular commercial products. They did not provide the source code showing exactly how the NSA managed to do this. So building physical and virtual firewalls around these specific tools became a top priority for dozens of NSA employees.

Imagine a forest of secrets to protect, and a frenzied effort by rival intelligence agencies to burn down as much of the greenery as possible. The most valuable — the tallest trees — include the locations of surreptitious taps, the identities of human, governmental, and commercial partners and sources, and the specific vulnerabilities in encryption the NSA had found and how they were exploited. Among the trees on the fringe of the fireline: mundane but valuable computer scripts used in everyday computer network operations.

A former intelligence official with direct operational knowledge of TAO and who worked from the outside the agency with some of its damage assessment teams reviewed the scripts for The Week and recognized many of them as genuine.

They did come from the NSA, the official said. Like everyone interviewed for this story, the official insisted on anonymity in exchange for providing a candid assessment of the situation.

This official believes that there are two possibilities. One is that a disgruntled insider — or a new whistleblower, styling himself like Edward Snowden — "simply walked out of the ROC with a thumb drive."

Another is that the secrets dribbled out of the NSA for years, and a country with sophisticated clandestine cyber capabilities had been waiting at the right point on the internet to collect them.

According to Top Secret budget documents leaked by Snowden, TAO teams control more than 85,000 implants hidden in computers and servers all over the world as well as the complex pathways that exfiltrated the data collected by these implants and transmitted the digital "take" back to the NSA for processing and analysis.

A typical TAO target might be a Russian think tank that provides strategic advice to President Vladimir Putin. Most computers used by employees at that organization have nothing that the U.S. intelligence community would want to see. But a small fraction would. Instead of asking a human asset to break into the building and install a cyber bug on all of its computers, TAO's ROC would find devices on the gateway on the network — often a commercial firewall — and hack through them, installing code that sniffs through all the traffic the server handles, looking for keywords and selectors that might be of interest.

Several documents released by Snowden listed the manufacturers of firewalls, operating systems, and control mechanisms the NSA managed to compromise. Some of these backdoors the NSA might have purchased directly from companies using secret agreements overseen by the agency's National Commercial Solution Center. Others were no doubt found by NSA developers themselves; whether they were shared with the companies whose products were compromised was a decision made above the heads of those that found them. Others were stolen by the NSA from foreign intelligence services that had discovered them.

To get into the targets — "boxes," the NSA calls them — ROC operators at "op stations" inside Ft. Meade, and in field stations in Georgia, Hawaii, and Texas, set up covert nodes on the regular internet to launch the attacks. To protect the locations of these agency-owned and operated nodes, the ROC operators launder their attacks through other computers. These are called "redirectors."

As Snowden tweeted on Tuesday, the agency's hackers are taught not leave footprints of their work on those computers; this would be clear evidence to foreign intelligence agencies that the NSA was using them.

"It's not like the NSA can build a second internet to transfer the copies of the main one. But the capacity to move this data around exists," a NSA consultant said. "You need to do it so it isn't recorded or billed for it."

Finding anonymous launch points is expensive and time consuming. That's why the same redirector might be used for hundreds of different operations.

"Sometimes, it'll be a firewall just copying data and sending it out. Sometimes it's much more complex," the intelligence official familiar with TAO's processes said.

If a foreign intelligence agency managed to "own" one of these redirectors, it could silently record all of the tools that the ROC hackers were using, collecting and archiving them. Intelligence officials and operators with knowledge of the cyber collection process say that the NSA understands that its exploits are sometimes hijacked, and that its redirectors might be discovered. (It has, in the process of defending America's cyber infrastructure, discovered many Chinese and Russian command and control computers that are used to penetrate American networks.)

According to several experts who have analyzed the source code, the Shadow Broker bundle contains exploits for firewalls, instructions to implant a backdoor into the memory of the device, and a number of self-deleting execution commands.

The files' explanatory language used leaves little doubt that the tools are used by the NSA. One of the tools, Apache_Setup.text, specifically directs a specified disk image to the "IP of redirector" and speaks of "getting ops station back to normal" after the trick is performed. The signature of the code is identical to commands and formats known to be used by the NSA.

Why would Russia release these tools now?

It's tempting to link the release directly to the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails earlier this summer — and that leak all but dares observers to conclude that Russia was trying to shake up the U.S. presidential election. The dates associated with the scripts and signatures of the more recent leak suggest that the country (and the hackers) have had them for a while — at least since 2013. After an entity known as Guccifer 2.0 released the DNC information, anonymous officials inside the government publicly attributed the hacks to the Russian government. The evidence, they said, was clear.

Snowden, for his part, said that Russia might have used the new malware leak to warn the U.S. away from attributing specific cyber operations — including the DNC attack — to their government. "This leak looks like a somebody sending a message that an escalation in the attribution game could get messy fast," he tweeted.

Another theory — one that is gaining some traction among experts outside the government — is that the Shadow Brokers release is the Russian response to an unknown-to-the-public U.S. government cyber operation against their country, one launched in retribution for the DNC hacks.

An administration official contacted Wednesday would not confirm that the NSA's tools had been stolen. But, this official said, "in cases like these, we would probably not do anything or say anything." What this official means, I think, is that the U.S still has the biggest and best covert SIGINT architecture in the world and maintaining that global dominance, rather than retaliating for specific transactions, is the preferred policy. At least in public.

A third option, one offered by the former intelligence official who worked with TAO: Perhaps the Russian want to simply induce panic inside the NSA. The exposure of these tools might lead TAO to burn accesses, which could give the Russians the means to map where and how the agency launched its operations from. (The NSA likely understands this, and will probably avoid acting in a way that would reveal any more of their covert infrastructure.)

At least two of the exploits point to previously unknown firewall vulnerabilities for Cisco and Fortinet products. The relationship between these companies and the NSA — already damaged by the Snowden revelations and subsequent disclosures — will get worse. "If NSA knew several years ago that its hacking tools were stolen, not notifying Cisco and other vulnerable U.S. firms would be outrageous," tweeted Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

But there might be a saving grace to this otherwise damaging leak. As valuable as these "endpoint" tools are, the tools used to break through routers and switches that form the "midpoints" of the global internet architecture haven't been among those released.

Hillary Clinton will fly out of Philadelphia with a clear template for campaigning against Donald Trump.

But because fear persuades more powerfully than hope, and because Trump is a natural template disrupter, Clinton must prepare to be strategically and tactically nimble in the fall. It is near impossible to respond conventionally to a candidate who uses fear to make what is small appear large, and what is large appear to be fantasy. Here are five thoughts that the Clinton campaign should keep in mind.

1. Don't actually try to court Republicans and don't worry about the 'Bernie-or-Bust' bots. Hillary Clinton will not win over waves of Republican voters. What she can do is to appeal to the conscience of enough Republicans to convince them simply not to vote for Donald Trump. Clinton should also spend little time responding to the #BernieOrBust concerns about persistent militarism, or about the direction she will take in her foreign policy. The concerns might be valid, but there is no political upside to spending any time dealing with them. She is no longer facing the pacifism of Bernie Sanders; she is countering the angry hunches of Donald Trump.

2. Clinton should not assume that her post convention increase in the polls will defy gravity. It will, indeed, be a bounce. Her numbers will go up, as Democrats feel solidarity and Democratic-leaning independents feel the afterglow of unfiltered, slickly produced party propaganda. Those numbers will then decline, most probably, to a new set point, as the Democratic leaners are reminded of their doubts about Clinton. But, as Nate Silver points out, polls tend to be more accurate after conventions. These conventions have drawn record numbers of viewers. And this convention was especially effective. Clinton's bounce might be unusually high, and her new set-point might be higher than her pre-convention baseline.

3. It's not the economy, stupid. Donald Trump will hit Clinton with a blizzard of economic statistics showing, accurately, that many Americans don't think the economy is getting better, and that many others feel abandoned by the new economy. Clinton must develop a concise way of explaining the effects of her economic policy proposals. But Trump's appeal is coded to appeal to the anxieties of the white working class. It cannot be fought with statistics or slogans. It must be fought by appealing to a different set of anxieties, namely, those that call Trump's competence into question. Here, Clinton would be well-served to fight Trump's economic message with a litany of Trump's failed businesses, his history of not caring for the working class, and by questioning his core honesty.

4. Put real people in her campaign ads. There were a number of remarkable political speakers at the Democratic National Convention, and most of them were civilians. The father of a fallen Muslim soldier, Khizr Kahn. The mother of an Army sergeant who died in Afghanistan. Children that Hillary Clinton has reached out to. Donald Trump has billionaires who can vouch for his generosity. Clinton has real Americans on her side, and they can be used organically and ingeniously. Americans crave authenticity, even if they can't define what authenticity is. Clinton herself might not be able to convince voters that she is her true self, but real people can testify to her true motivations.

5. Those ads must be negative. Yes, "When they go low, we go high," as Michelle Obama said. But Clinton's campaign shouldn't try to float above the scrum. Attacks against Trump's character, competence, and sanity work. They work when real people, like Khizr Khan, deliver them. Clinton should reserve her own broadside against Trumpism for moments when everyone is watching, like during the debates, and she should let her campaign — and surrogates — do the work until then.

When Donald Trump tweeted after Bernie Sanders' speech that Sanders "totally sold out to Crooked Hillary Clinton. All of that work, energy and money, and nothing to show for it! Waste of time!" he was exactly half right. Maybe you'll quibble with the verb, but Sanders did capitulate to Hillary Clinton. But he sure as hell didn't sell out for nothing.

He sold out, and Clinton changed her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a result, probably dooming that trade bill, a signature piece of President Obama's second-term foreign policy agenda.

He sold out, and the Democrats changed their superdelegate rules, binding a much larger percentage of them to the popular vote winners of state contests. At a minimum, this means that establishment candidates will be forced to organize more heavily at a lower level of politics in more states in the future.

He sold out, and he and Clinton are now on board with a college tuition proposal that would satisfy Sanders' criteria, not the one Clinton initially believed in.

He sold out, and the party endorsed what Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) called its "most progressive platform in history."

He sold out, and he received a primetime speaking slot, getting a chance to give what amounted to a concise version of his campaign stump speech, without filters.

He sold out, and his own name will get to be held up for the nomination on Tuesday.

He sold out, and the superdelegates he's attempted to persuade still have the freedom to vote for the candidate of their choice.

He sold out, and his supporters will have greater access to the reins of power inside the party. They will get to determine the rules, going forward.

He sold out, and Hillary Clinton, loathe to commit to hold a potential Supreme Court justice to any standard other than to recognize that the Constitution lives and breathes, now must nominate a justice who specifically opposes a settled law of the land.

The #BernieOrBust delegates who interrupted their own candidate with boos last night, the ones who marched alongside a giant doobie outside the convention, and the few who tried to throw Elizabeth Warren off stride with cries of "We Trusted You!" are like the people who carry phones with cracked screens, refusing to get them replaced, even for free.

In Trump's mind, since Sanders didn't get the private plane his staff had asked the DNC for, perhaps Sanders got nothing. That's because in Trump's mind — as in the mind of the #BernieOrBust folks — not getting everything is the same as getting nothing.

If you watched the convention on television, your day likely began with news footage of contention. The midpoint was, funnily enough, comedian Sarah Silverman's shade throw from the platform, calling the #BernieorBust movement "ridiculous." The peak was Michelle Obama's speech, which was among the most effective arguments I've heard anyone make for Hillary Clinton. And Sanders himself was the denouement. Thanks to judicious directing by the television pool, the crying, defiant Sanders supporters seemed to be energized at the beginning of the day, reproached by the middle, and crying, resigned (perhaps) to his defeat by the end.

The truth, I suspect, is that the media just went fishing for a narrative. Clinton has the support of about 85 percent of Sanders' supporters nationwide already; Trump has the support, after his convention, of about 85 percent of all Republicans who said they voted in their primaries. Both parties are going forward relatively united. How enthusiastic they are relative to their unity is a separate question — and it is one that, uniquely, and perhaps alone, Hillary Clinton will be responsible for answering.

I don't believe in conspiracies until I find proof to support them. I find guilt-by-association arguments illogical and unfair, overused by politicians and pundits alike.

But the theory that Russia facilitated the leaking of tens of thousands of emails, some of them damning, from the Democratic National Committee, cannot be dismissed as trifling.

There is, in fact, real evidence that the DNC email system was hacked by a branch of the Russian military intelligence service. There is real evidence that the hacker who leaked the documents, known as "Guccifer," has ties to the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has not coherently explained how Europe should handle the Russian incursion into Ukraine, nor has he expressed a definitive view on whether Vladimir Putin has a claim to parts of that country. But Trump has certainly spoken admirably of Putin. "He's running his country and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country," Trump said on MSNBC's Morning Joe back in December.

Trump's intention to gut NATO's charter — until NATO countries pay up, somehow — and to undermine the collective strength that serves as a deterrent to Russia is also now on the record.

Putin's nationalism is not always irrational. His view of recent history is comprehensible. His desire to restore luster to the Russian brand is excusable. But Putin's tactics, his cult of personality, his persecution of enemies, the murder of journalists and harassment of political dissidents, his racism, xenophobia, corruption — all that is execrable. His designs on the Baltic states inject fear into an already jittery Europe. He is not a force for stability. All of which means the next U.S. president has hard choices to make.

I don't believe that Trump is wittingly doing the bidding of the Russian Federation or its security and enmeshed governmental and corporate interests. There is no evidence that Trump is unduly influenced by Putin himself. (And the Trump campaign denies that is has anything to do with the hack.)

But it's fair to say the Kremlin believes it would be able to prosecute Putin's policies with vigor and ease with Trump as president. It's not an unwarranted stretch to believe that Putin has heard nothing from Trump's mouth or from his campaign that would give him pause.

That, in and of itself, shouldn't be a huge problem. Foreign leaders have interests, too. If they decide that one candidate is better for them than another, then it would stand to reason that they translate that preference into policy. Here's what logic says: Just because Putin thinks Trump would be a better president for him doesn't mean that Trump would actually go easy on Russia, or that Trump thinks the same about Putin.

But if it has become Russian policy to try and influence the election of the next president of the United States, then we, as citizens, should at least be aware of that intervention.

And now we are. Because Russia really does seem to be intervening on behalf of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's unstinting focus on law and order, his repeated flouting of liberal social pieties, and his promise to restore luster and a pulse to America's economy, landed on many deaf ears Thursday night. Of that I have no doubt.

But given the realities of his personality and his appeal, both the electoral real estate as yet unclaimed by him or Hillary Clinton and the very significant and indelible limits his own rhetoric has placed upon him, it was probably the best speech he could have given.

"Together, we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace," he said at the outset. "We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order."

"My message is that things have to change — and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned."

"I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice."

Let's distill the political goals of his convention to their essence: Blow apart the Obama coalition by dividing its idealists from its mainstays, and motivate, through an admixture of fear and aspiration, white voters who believe they are "forgotten" to turn out in record numbers.

"Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored," he said. "The most basic duty of any government is to defend its citizens. Any government that fails to do so is unfit to lead."

The last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, fell 64 electoral votes short of 270, which, had the election been thrown in the tie to the House of Representatives, would have probably given him the presidency. It is not a coincidence that the four states Donald Trump is targeting most heavily — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio — collectively make up 64 electoral votes.

Although the nation's demographic diversity is driving Democrats to an eventual majority, this coalition is not growing quickly enough in the Rustbelt for a Democratic candidate to win a general election without higher-than-normal turnout among well-educated white voters and among minorities, particularly blacks.

"In some ways, Democrats have been living on borrowed time in the Rustbelt," wrote Ron Brownstein, one of the nation's most accurate political demographers. He means that a majority of voters in those states (and one more, Iowa), are working class and white. They are a minority, or a large plurality, in the states where Hillary Clinton holds significant leads right now — a cluster of seven battleground states in the nation's sunbelt. Clinton leads in North Carolina, which went Republican in 2012, which means that Trump still has to flip Iowa and one other state if he wants to win the election, but the election, as you know, is many, many moments away.

Can Trump do well enough — significantly better, actually — than Republicans have done in the past five elections in the Rustbelt among white, working-class-identified voters? If he can't, he will lose in a landslide.

Everything Trump said Thursday night was tuned to these voters, those who identify as being part of the working class, those who are pessimistic about the direction of the economy and the country, those who feel left behind and marginalized by the great demographic inversion that is turning America into a majority-minority nation.

There are discontinuities; you can't call these voters "non-college whites," because white voters with college degrees voted in 2012 more for the Republican than they did for the Democrat in three of these states. The term conflates those who don't have a degree with those who are working towards their degree. In Wisconsin, Barack Obama won both groups in 2012 by an average of 4.5 percentage points; collectively, they made up 58 percentage of the electorate. Trump would need to offset Clinton's margins among college students by either dampening turnout or by triggering a landslide that rolls up 60,000 new voters into his total.

In Michigan, Mitt Romney beat Obama by 11 points among whites, who made up 77 percent of the electorate. Obama beat Romney by 90 points among black voters, and that, plus his margins among the sprinkling of Hispanic voters in Michigan, gave him an edge of more than 400,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, Mitt Romney won among voters with just a college degree. He won among voters making more than $50,000 a year. He won among voters who wanted a strong leader and who shared his values. He still lost the state by 300,000 votes. Obama's turnout among minorities, young voters, suburbanites, and whites with post-graduate degrees was just too high.

Throwing political reality aside, it is not normal to pretend that the argument Trump is making comports with the facts. When Trump promised to "honor the American people with the truth and nothing else," he let loose a stream of statistics that had little to do with the observable universe. Crime rates are up, but they're down among illegal immigrants, who are being deported in higher numbers (and at higher rates) than ever before. The chance that a white person in America will be the victim of a crime committed by someone who is not a family member is tiny. Those are facts.

But his speech comported with real fears. And if fears matter more — and can motivate a million more people across five states to vote and a million fewer people in another five states to stay home — Donald Trump can win.

For three nights, speakers successfully prosecuted Hillary Clinton. For three nights, they failed to make the case that Trump is a credible commander in chief. The gap between these two threshold convention goals was stark early Wednesday; it blew apart with the force of a supernova when Ted Cruz, a vanquished opponent who refused to release his delegates and has his eyes set on the 2020 race, pointedly, unsubtly, and ungracefully declined to endorse him.

Even as Cruz made a powerful case against Clinton, he could not bring himself to say that Trump was the better choice. By implication, Cruz was leaning in to a Trump loss in November. The implication was not lost on the audience, who began to boo and jeer. It was not lost on Trump, who suddenly appeared in the convention hall, trying to placate the crowd with an upturned thumb.

Cruz's prepared remarks went for nine minutes. He spoke for 23. The wisdom of letting him speak at all was lost on me; has Cruz ever given anyone the impression that he's in it for anyone but himself? He outfoxed Donald Trump, clearly, and probably outfoxed himself; the reaction, even by his supporters, to his endorsement ghosting will probably hurt his chances in four years.

As the convention audience tried to digest all of this — surely, more drama than any convention in modern memory has given us — the clock hit 10 p.m., and tens of millions of more people tuned in. They heard Trump's son Eric speak movingly about his father. The nominee teared up at the end.

Then Newt Gingrich came on. He decided to lecture the audience. They misunderstood Cruz, he insisted. When Cruz said, "You can vote your conscience to anyone who will uphold the Constitution," Cruz meant, of course, that "in this election, there is only one candidate who will uphold the Constitution." Gingrich continued: "To paraphrase Ted Cruz, the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump-Pence Republican ticket."

But of course, Cruz did not say that. Gingrich's damage-control mind-reading could not bring back the oxygen that Cruz's selfish stand for principle had sucked out of the room.

No doubt true: A candidate with character flaws as large as Trump's needs to fully discredit Clinton in order to win in November. Negative energy is a better bet.

But Trump has not crossed the basic threshold of plausibility. He is not giving recalcitrant Republicans, or independents, really, a reason to go to the polls. He is giving Democrats plenty of reasons to turn out for Hillary Clinton.

Replicating the seat-of-his-pants scorched earth strategy that worked in the primaries gets him a plurality of a minority of the popular vote and delivers to Clinton a resounding victory in the electoral college. That's why a well-orchestrated convention, free of unforced errors, dynamic and interesting, is essential.

The Republican vice presidential nominee, Gov. Mike Pence, gave an acceptance speech as graceful as Cruz's was gauche. But it will be Cruz whose vignettes will go viral, not Pence's. The same media environment that Trump mastered to win the nomination will ensure that his foul-ups will loop endlessly while his good choices get mediocre notice.

On Tuesday, as the 10 p.m. super-primetime hour approached, I had the same feeling: It looked like Trump could pull himself out of the hole created by his wife Melania's plagiarism flap.

His two children delivered deftly constructed speeches. Tiffany Trump, 22, spoke of a doting father who cared less about her grades and more that his little girl was happy in school. Donald Trump Jr., a true conservative, spoke of the hard work and humility his "hero" Dad imparted to him. The latter managed to take up a good chunk of the 10 o'clock hour, when tens of millions of people tune in because the major networks begin their coverage. It was a good start.

But then Lucifer messed with the program. Inexplicably, a charged-up Dr. Ben Carson, a vanquished Trump rival with a narrow range of vision, was given prime time real estate to pull out phrases that meant something only to a slab of the Republican base. The man who Trump once mocked as having "lower energy than Jeb" spent two minutes on political correctness. "I hate political correctness. It is antithetical to the founding principles of this country." When the audience predictably cheered, he stepped on his own lines: "Don't eat up my time!" he implored.

He abandoned his prepared remarks. He implied that Hillary Clinton was in a league with the devil. Her hero, he said, was Saul Alinsky, dropping the name of an obscure socialist labor organizer as if he were Bono. And Alinsky "acknowledges Lucifer," Carson insisted.

Carson did not manage to make much of a case for Trump. He just wanted everyone to know how bad a Clinton administration would be.

That's not a bad message for a convention that is designed to cast Clinton as a crook more than it is to sell Trump as a president. But the messenger couldn't deliver. For some reason, organizers decided to fill the rest of the 10 o'clock hour with two ordinary people — a soap opera star and the founder of American Muslims for Trump. He delivered the final benediction. On television, delegates, wanting to get to those buses before big lines formed, were seen walking out. Not a good image.

Why didn't the younger Trump daughter, whose speech charmed everyone, get that time? For that matter, why didn't Chris Christie, who prosecuted a blistering case against Clinton when he spoke earlier, get a better speaking slot?

Christie had the audience cheering, over and over, "Lock her up, Lock her up." His speech was mean, and over the top, and it violated the norms of politics, but his party knows that the only way their nominee can win is if millions of Americans who plan to vote for her decide instead that her conduct in office disqualifies her from being president. For what Republicans needed to do, it was effective. And many, many fewer people saw it than who might have.

On Monday night, Melania Trump, the wife of soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, stood in front of thousands of people gathered at the Republican National Convention, and millions more watching on television, and gave a speech that clearly borrowed heavily from one given by Michelle Obama in 2008. The video evidence is undeniable.

The accusations of plagiarism were swift and numerous. "Two full paragraphs from the current first lady is just incomprehensible," former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau told BuzzFeed. "I can't believe someone would do that to her." The Trump campaign was quick to respond on the defensive. "In writing her beautiful speech," they said in a statement, "Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success." Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort went as far as to dismiss the plagiarism allegations as "just really absurd," and explained that there was overlap simply because "these are common words and values."

But the speech speaks for itself. In one passage, 22 out of Melania's 26 words were taken directly from Michelle Obama's address. This is plagiarism.

Another Republican presidential nominee might emerge from this unscathed. One with a unified party, a disciplined message operation, and a reputation for honesty and goodwill could easily survive a mistake of this kind. But Donald Trump is not that candidate, and this will hurt his campaign.

Trump has utterly failed to unify the GOP. He has not made gestures to bring together warring wings of his party, nor to smooth over hurt feelings. This continued well into the convention itself. Indeed, 44 percent of Republicans say they would have preferred to nominate someone else. Instead of giving voice on Monday to delegates chosen to represent other candidates, Trump's convention parliamentarian shut down a vote asking for a roll call of credentials. Trump would have won this roll call, surely a show of strength. But the orders from on high would not allow an inch of ground to be ceded. The visuals from the convention floor were dreadful.

As for discipline, Trump has none. That's one reason he is admired; he makes gut calls and changes his mind on the fly. But this rarely works out for him. What about honesty? A lie a day from Trump is the norm.

But surely Melania, a political novice, deserves the benefit of the doubt. Surely we can forgive her one instance of plagiarism.

This probably isn't even Melania's fault. While she told NBC's Matt Lauer earlier on Monday that she wrote the speech virtually by herself, her campaign now says the speech was written for her by a team who interviewed her, cobbled something together, and then sent her a draft for her editing. But that team apparently failed to run the speech through any one of the pretty good online plagiarism checkers.

The big issue is the audacity of the ideas Melania Trump (or Trump campaign staffers) stole. Her husband has been at the vanguard of the movement designed to question Barack Obama's patriotism, his religion, and his identity. Donald Trump has insinuated, at least twice in the last month, that Obama has ulterior motives when dealing with ISIS and terrorism. He accuses Obama of deliberately sowing the seeds of racial dissent. He has warned of racial unrest.

Monday night, on a national stage, a white woman appropriated heartfelt words from a black woman whose husband has been the target of a ruthless and concentrated dehumanization campaign from the husband of the white woman.

This week, the Republicans will nominate for president a man who, when he watches the film Fight Club, would have no trouble believing that Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden is the hero.

That's a problem.

If you haven't seen Fight Club, it's about an insomniac loser, played by Edward Norton, who meets his polar opposite, a devil-may-care nihilist soap salesman, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, and joins him to compete in an underground fight club. (First rule of Fight Club: Find a good synopsis and link to it!). The movie appears to celebrate Durden's brashness, his visceral sexuality, his umbrella of certitude, and his anti-consumerism. But then this group of men transforms from a fight club into a terrorist movement, with Durden as its leader. Durden is everything Norton's character — who has no name — is not. At the end, amidst a massive terrorist attack against an American city, Norton realizes that he actually is Durden — and tries to kill himself.

David Fincher directed the movie, based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk, and in the press hype surrounding the film, Fincher went out of his way to note that Durden was not, to him, a hero in any way. Normally, a director wouldn't have to label his characters for an audience, but such is the convention and talent of Fincher's filmmaking that, as you watch Fight Club, you can easily be consumed by its fantasy of unbridled anti-capitalist revenge and miss the veil of satire that Fincher has created over its unbridled celebration of impulsive living. As Fincher said, Tyler Durden "can deal with the conception of our lives in an idealistic fashion, but it doesn't have anything to do with the compromises of real life as modern man knows it."

Now, Donald Trump is not Tyler Durden. He's actually more like the nameless Edward Norton character, just with better luck. But Trump's voters admire their candidate for many of the same reasons that so many Fight Club viewers looked up to Durden.

Donald Trump is unexceptional. Despite his proclamations of enormity and superiority, Trump is an average human being. He just has a lot of money and a talent for being clever, and he's found a way to project an avatar of himself — "Donald Trump" — onto the stage at just the right moment. But "Donald Trump" isn't really real.

Trump is not curious. He doesn't seem to read. He has no talent for running organizations — the best anyone can say about him is that he has a real-life aversion to firing people in person and has no discernable, above-the-level-of-platitude business philosophy. He gets off on impulsive decisions. He knows that Americans get off by celebrating success that derives itself from those types of decisions. He was lucky with a television show, which resuscitated his brand at a time when his real estate empire was crumbling.

Every time Trump the TV personality clashes with reality, reality wins. Trump the personality hopes that Crooked Hillary will collapse under the weight of her own mistakes, but Trump the person can't figure his way out of his own head. Trump the personality wishes for a splashy vice presidential rollout, one of the three things between now and the election he controls entirely (the debates and the conventions are the other), and it fizzles because he can't seem to make up his mind, and is anxious about being upstaged. Trump the personality insists he doesn't need the press, but he craves their approval and cherry picks their adjectives.

So why is Trump so popular?

A large chunk of the Fight Club audience assumed that Durden was the hero. That's why Fincher had to explain that he didn't intend for Durden to be the hero. Voter affection for Trump mimics this dynamic. He is popular because he seems to live in the now, free of constraints and limits. Trump gave the GOP base a great time in the primaries by ridiculing, by bullying, by bloodying his opponents. He gives us a good time, often at his own expense, even when he doesn't realize it.

Living in the now, as Tyler Durden found, was a great way to avenge the bastards who set the rules that held him down. He's a great character in a great movie. But he's not a hero, and the world he inhabits is not the one we actually live in.

In the aftermath of the deadliest day for American law enforcement since September 11, TheNew York Post decided to try to foment a race war. The front page of the tabloid today shows a photograph of Dallas Police Department officers prone on the ground, bleeding to death. The headline: "Civil War."

The implication is not subtle. The Post's editorialists believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is fundamentally about revenge against white people. The assailants who methodically shot cops in the back were combatants in a conflict that pits black people against white people.

First, some truth: Despite the fact that the Dallas suspect reportedly told police that he "wanted to kill white people," there is no race war; there has not been (and probably won't be) any increase in crimes against white people because they are white; and Black Lives Matter, despite occasionally and regretfully incendiary rhetoric from a few of its members, is not opposed to the existence of the police. The Dallas Police Department's officers shielded protesters from harm's way last night. Protesters helped rush the victims to the hospital.

But it's scary enough that a universe exists where The Post feels comfortable — or even compelled — to paint the divisions between black and white this starkly. It's scary, too, that many, many Americans, and not just those who responded to a critical tweet on my feed, seem to agree with The Post.

The latest data from Pew shows that nearly 40 percent of whites believe that the country has already done everything it can to grant black people full and equal rights, both de jure and de facto. Only 36 percent of whites believe that racial discrimination contributes to persistent economic inequality between the races.

I chose these two statistics — there are many others — because their premises are easily refuted by actual experience. There's overwhelming evidence that, in the heat of the moment, police officers are more likely to shoot black people simply because they are black. (If you're a black teenager, you are 21 times more likely to be the victim of a police shooting than you would be if you were white). And racial disparities persist in employment, even when other factors, like age or education background, are taken into account.

Ah, but The Post would have you believe that these complaints are ephemeral or irrelevant. They attribute to black people an anger and a gut desire to just get back at society for mistreating them.

This narrative has been a feature of our conversation since Barack Obama became president.

It gained steam as the identity politics movement re-asserted itself on college campuses and found a voice on social media. It finds its ultimate expression in politics, particularly in the perception that Obama and Democrats have given stuff to people who don't deserve extra help, while others are left to deal with the very real challenges of life by themselves. It is not entirely without foundation, either: Political, social, and media elites have developed certain sensitivities about race, religion, and gender that anyone crosses at their peril.

Donald Trump is this narrative's protagonist. The Post loves him, obviously. Even if not explicitly racist — a debatable proposition — the way he vents his spleen and then refuses to apologize to the elites for violating their conventions — is seductive to a very large segment of Americans.

Trump has been measured, so far, in his response to Dallas, and to the shootings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota. But that's probably because he hasn't stepped to the microphones and spoken about them just yet. When he does, I'd bet he'll join the chorus of those who blame Obama for inciting racial unrest (by... well, just being open to the reality of implicit racial bias among the police).

A recent poll reveals that California's Democratic presidential primary is far too competitive for Hillary Clinton's comfort. Sen. Bernie Sanders is even making inroads among Hispanics.

But to pull out a victory, it would have to be resounding, and dispersed — California awards delegates to the winners of Congressional districts — and he would have to convince basically every superdelegate who supports Clinton to flip. It's next to impossible for all those cards to be played and in sequence. Still, it's hard not to notice how a large segment of the Democratic voting base seems willing to upset the apple cart. And since these young voters will determine the direction the party takes in the future, the superdelegates of today owe them an audience.

So here is the best argument I think Bernie Sanders could make to superdelegates at this point in the race. I don't necessarily endorse the particulars of what I'm about to write, but I think it's fairly persuasive.

Dear Superdelegate,

I don't want to waste your time. Put aside everything you may think about me, for a moment, and put aside your admirable loyalty to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I want you to focus instead on Donald Trump.

I would agree, wholeheartedly, that Secretary Clinton can defeat him in the fall, and if she is the nominee, I will work to make sure she does. But I don't think beating Trump in November will be necessary or sufficient.

His candidacy has already caused significant damage to our country. You know this. You sense it in every conversation you have with a friend. You understand how the success of Trump's candidacy makes you feel as an American.

Back to me for a second. Maybe you think I am too old to be a two-term president. Maybe you think a socialist will be too idealistic in office and won't be able to make progress on the policies of President Obama that have moved our country forward. I would vigorously disagree with you — my health is pretty fantastic, and I'd dare any of you to endure the rigors of a campaign trail for even a month — but I'm willing to concede that there are going to be a lot of arguments inside our party if I become president.

But if I do become president — and if I am the nominee, I will become the president — I will become president having soundly defeated Donald Trump. Not by a little, but by a lot. The polls have been consistent on one measure here, and it's this: I crush him. Hillary beats him or she loses to him or she ties. I crush him.

Here is what I'm saying: It would be better for the country if an ineffectual one-term Democratic president destroys Donald Trump and his revolution than it would be to have a marginally effective Democratic president who ekes out a victory.

The most important job you have as a citizen, right now, is to smash to pieces in a convincing and incontrovertible way the forces of hate and bigotry and revanchism that are bankrolling his candidacy.

The most important message to send to the world after this election is not a policy. It's the election itself. An election that shows that the majority of Americans will give no quarter to the instantiation of fear, nativism, and other obstacles that block progress.

Maybe Hillary Clinton doesn't deserve her lot now. Maybe it's unfair that her unfavorables appear to be overdetermined. Maybe the polls showing that I will crush Trump are ephemeral and indicative of just one of such many moments from now until November.

But boy, if your bottom-line goal is to stop Trump, to stop him from acquiring the power to unleash our nuclear weapons, to move forward and pull the country out of its self-flagellatory 21st century anxieties, you can do nothing better than to choose as your nominee someone who you might not think would be a terrific president but whose election itself will be an action that reverberates. My victory will be loud enough to convince enough of the Trump forces that they are wrong and convince the GOP that it needs to grow modern roots.

Because frankly: Almost beating Trump is like not beating him at all. Even though he says otherwise. Even though he won't be president. Almost beating means he could have won. And that's a disaster for everything we value as citizens, right?

We should not want him as an almost president. We shouldn't want him to be almost elected. That would be very, very bad.

We should want him to be demolished in the way that Americans have turned back those who would defeat us before.

Before you go to the convention, I would ask you to pause a moment. Look at the polling. Look at how many people know I am Democratic socialist and who would vote for me — and who tell pollsters they'd vote for me. Look at what those people are voting for and who they are voting against. Look at where history is and where history needs to be.

And ask yourself: What would be better for the country? Not who. But what.

The Libertarian Party selects its nominee in Orlando this weekend, and for the first time since the mid-1990s, their leading candidate is polling at or around 10 percent nationally. That man — former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson — is a regular on network and cable television, and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, is settling into his own public role quite nicely.

The Libertarian Party certainly faces structural challenges in a nation dominated by two political parties. But their main problem is different — and it's one they have control over.

Take their platform, which is meant to organize the party's policy choices. Here's what the Libertarians say about health care:

We favor a free market health care system. We recognize the freedom of individuals to determine the level of health insurance they want (if any), the level of health care they want, the care providers they want, the medicines and treatments they will use and all other aspects of their medical care, including end-of-life decisions. People should be free to purchase health insurance across state lines. [Libertarian Party]

I can see two specifics in there. One is health care portability. Insurance companies should be able to sell policies that aren't just limited to a single state. National plans could be cost effective and cheaper. The second: Repeal the health insurance mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act. Libertarians believe that Americans shouldn't have to buy health care if they don't want to.

There are arguments — pro and con — to be had about these two policies. But regardless of which side you land on, these two policies — the only two that seem embedded in these principles — are wholly insufficient to govern the health care of hundreds of millions of people.

What would Libertarians do for Americans who believe they are owed health insurance coverage but would lose that coverage if their employer stopped offering insurance? (GOPers who've proposed alternative health insurance plans always include "transitional assistance" for this pool, so that no one would go without insurance until the whole plan, whatever it is, takes effect.). What would Libertarians do to help insurers access new markets across state lines? (The issue isn't that they're regulated differently. It's that insurers have to create networks of doctors and hospitals. These do not self-organize. Putting them together takes time.)

Maybe the answer is: nothing. A Libertarian president would work with Congress to prune every health-related regulation as much as possible, and then let market forces work. Americans would oppose that approach, but it's what the platform suggests could happen.

But I don't think Gary Johnson and Bill Weld could stand the enormous pressure that would come from advocacy groups and the media and people without coverage… and do nothing.

A piecemeal dismantling of our quasi public-private health care system is possible, too. But Libertarians haven't said what that would look like either.

The point here is that Johnson is running to become the chief executive of an extremely statist entity, and he's doing so from a perch that is diametrically opposed to the modern state. This cognitive dissonance is hard for Libertarians to resolve. It would be near impossible to govern solely as a Libertarian if Republicans and Democrats split control of Congress, too. On economic issues, the Libertarian ticket might easily align with the corporate cloth-coat wing of the party, but on trade agreements, it would not. Nor would a Libertarian Supreme Court nominee please the right.

Riffing on the Libertarians after mentioning a poll showing that half of registered voters say they'd be open to a third-party candidate, Seth Meyers said:

A third-party candidate is a little bit like a Tinder date. You think to yourself, "What have I go to lose?... Can't be worse than my exes." Then you get the to the restaurant and sitting there in one of those Western-style fringe jackets talking about how we shouldn't have to pay taxes and how weed should be legal because the Founding Fathers smoked weed and you couldn't help but stop staring at their lazy eye, and then you walk into the subway, and you text your ex and say, "Hey, you up?"

The two exes: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. [Seth Meyers]

Perhaps Meyers is a bit unfair to the Libertarians. But some solid policy proposals — proposals that address the concerns Americans have right now — might wipe the smirk off his face.

The 2016 presidential election featuring Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton might end up being as nasty as Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams' fierce face-off in 1800. (Team Jefferson accused Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character," and the Adams camp ripped Jefferson as "the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." And so on.)

The 2016 election also might be as realigning as the election of 1828, when the Democratic-Republicans split over the power of banks and the federal government. The 2016 election may well change the way elections themselves operate, like in 1896, when William McKinley discovered the power of both regional media and big business fundraising.

But historians listening to Donald Trump prepare to take on Hillary Clinton also hear an echo from 1968. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, making Lyndon B. Johnson president, Americans picked Johnson again in 1964 as the man best suited to carry out Kennedy's policies. But then, in 1968, they quickly reversed course.

The 1968 election cycle featured two turbulent primaries, political assassinations, the breakup of a major party, and the breaking out of barely suppressed but incredibly powerful white working-class rage. It ended with the election of Richard Nixon, and with two parties bearing new identities: The Democrats were the party of civil rights; the Republicans were the party of law and order. Voters began to cluster accordingly.

Why did the country change its mind so quickly?

The same question is on my mind now. How could the same country that turned to Barack Obama so enthusiastically in 2008 and 2012 be ready to shelve everything associated with that man and elect his total opposite?

The tectonic plates of politics are always moving, and in a polarized country, we are, in fact, always shifting back and forth between poles. The election might depend on what mood a small group of swing voters in swing states are in on the morning of the first Tuesday in November.

Or perhaps it's just that Obama is the anomaly. He co-opted the technology and language of anxious millennials. Or maybe the Republicans simply wasted two otherwise ripe cycles nominating good, smart men — John McCain and Mitt Romney — who, for the most part, played to people's ambitions, and not to their fears.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is one giant bundle of resentment, to borrow Rick Perlstein's description of Nixon. But Trump, of course, is no Nixon. Politically and intellectually, Nixon was much smarter and far more cautious. There is no easy way to link the men other than to notice how they managed to capture a certain frustrated, anxious mood, colored by but not entirely explained by racial and ethnic resentment, exploit it by division, and ride it all the way to victory

In language and temperament, Trump bears a passing similarity to George Wallace, the flamboyantly populist and demagogic former Alabama governor who ran for president in 1968 and saw the world in black and white and had to make a pledge to his donors not to use the "n" word in public. Wallace ran as an American Independent to try to get the House of Representatives to decide the election. He believed that the establishment of the Republican Party had been taken over by racial integrationists bent on compromise. He was not opposed to big government so much as he was a keen advocate of redirecting the flow of its money.

Like Trump, Nixon was not a real conservative. As author Michael Cohen notes, "Nixon continued the process of social provision begun under Roosevelt [but] he cloaked it in the language of populist anti-government and anti-elitist rhetoric."

Anti-government conservative rhetoric became more popular, particularly as it related to government transfer programs aimed at the poor and minorities.

Liberals grabbed the levers of power inside their party, taking it way from big-city mayors and union bosses, and broke the Democratic Party into factions that persist to this day.

The "silent majority" began to assert itself on issues of crime, drugs, and cultural liberalism.

The middle class focused intently on keeping what they had gotten. Since 1965, they had gained quite a bit, as the economy grew. But they perceived the opposite, and so they tried to build a moat to keep their castles intact.

Does that sound like 2016? In many ways, yes. But there are profound differences, too.

For one thing, in 1968 both parties still had control over their nomination process. There was no way Wallace could ever have won the Republican nomination, as Trump is on the verge of doing.

In 1968, the American middle class was still on the tail end of some very good years. Today, the white working class has not benefited from the slow but steady economic growth that has characterized the Obama era. Certain groups have. But many policies, like the health insurance reform Obama began — and the next president (even Trump) will likely finish — may take years of trial and error before people begin to feel more security from them. And neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party has a plausible platform for economic prosperity. The Democrats seem to use a lot of trendy buzzwords and hope that Americans begin to assess their condition more accurately. The Republicans are still focused on supply-side tax cuts.

In 1968, the media was monolithic. It carried influence, it arbitrated between right and wrong, and it conferred legitimacy. Today, the media is anarchic, afraid of its own shadow, and it carries, and repeats to us, the stuff that makes us mad without giving us a real way to do anything about it, aside from expressing that anger at someone else online. Creative hashtags won't heal American divisions.

Finally, Johnson had Vietnam. Barack Obama has his silent wars, but none of this is remotely as divisive as the conflict in Indochina, which, in fact, came to bedevil Nixon as much as it did Johnson, even as Nixon was well-suited to exploit the carnage for domestic political advantage. As Cohen notes, Johnson pursued a middle ground on Vietnam, and lost his party, and then lost the middle of the country. His bridge to white voters, already rickety because of his extraordinary assertiveness on civil rights, crumpled because he escalated the war. Americans did not want to "middle through." They wanted to win — or they wanted to get out.

Johnson could never figure out how to make Americans feel good about being Americans. His policies at home were divisive, and he did not have the right options available to him — or so he felt — to intervene decisively in a way that kept Americans focus on what united them.

And today, Trump says he wants to make America great again. Echoes of 1968, after all.

Before we answer that question, we'll take a small digression into the world of political polling. Its denizens are in one of their perpetual self-flagellator modes. That means they are on tenterhooks about the assumptions that underlie their own work and aren't likely to be in a mood to give definitive answers to anything.

I'm tempted to direct you to FiveThirtyEight, but then you'd be subject to a discussion of Bayesian priors, and a bit of self-loathing, from Nate Silver, who did not predict the rise of Donald Trump and therefore thinks there is something wrong with him (Nate!), because the whole world expects Nate to predict every major event because…. I don't really know. I can't think of anything Nate and his compadres could have done differently. I don't understand the ruckus. You can jump into that bespectacled rabbit hole if you want.

I won't. I'm ok with pundits. A pundit who asks questions of a lot of people and synthesizes a guestimate about what might happen in the future is called a reporter. There are many great reporters, like Bob Costa, and David Weigel, who got Trump's rise right. There are a good number of scientists and wonks, like Norm Ornstein, who decided that Trump could win the Republican nomination and perhaps even be competitive in the general election because they went out into the world and selected the right trends to pay attention to. These guys (forgive me: There is still a male skew in political science and GOP nominating reporting) guessed right because they've studied politics up close, because they've read widely and skeptically, because they listen to people before making up their minds, and because they are humble enough to realize that "political laws of physics" are not the same thing as the actual laws of physics. The grip that a party has on its nomination process will change during a primary season, even if the rules are static. That's because the tightness of that grip is determined by a bunch of forces, some of which are themselves a product of human decisions. Donald Trump decided to do a lot of things that propelled himself to the nomination.

Having tweaked Nate Silver, let me praise him. He's on to the reasons why the polls are showing a tighter race between Hillary Clinton and Trump. One is that the Republican Party has its nominee. There are many psychological, evolutionary, and cognitive forces at work in persuading anyone who leans to the right to rally around the person who is going to take on Clinton in the fall, but let's just call this one the "party effect," and it's kicking in.

Back to the polls themselves. That Fox poll surveyed people randomly nationwide. A CBS News/New York Timespoll of registered voters gives Clinton a 6-point lead, down from 10 points, but still respectable. Trump's slightly increased support comes from Republicans who have accepted him as their nominee; Clinton has not lost her standing among Democrats and is down slightly among independents — Sanders voters, primarily.

The Times write-up of the poll reminds readers that, at this point in 2008, only 60 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Barack Obama. By the election, virtually all of them were on board. Remarkably, the Democratic Party is more unified today than it was at the same point in the last competitive cycle. These three paragraphs are incredibly important and worth quoting in full:

Mr. Trump is hampered by a high level of contempt among important voting blocs. Only 21 percent of female voters view him favorably, while 60 percent view him unfavorably. A mere 14 percent of voters 18 to 29 view him positively, while 65 percent of such young voters have a negative opinion about him. And just 12 percent of nonwhite voters view Mr. Trump favorably, while 68 percent view him unfavorably.

Mrs. Clinton fares little better. Just 23 percent of white voters view her favorably, while 63 percent of whites have an unfavorable view. Men dislike her almost as much as women dislike Mr. Trump: Only 26 percent of men view her favorably, and 58 percent hold an unfavorable perception of her.

One factor working in Mrs. Clinton's favor, though, is that the current Democrat in the White House is enjoying a modest rejuvenation. Fifty percent of Americans now approve of President Obama's job performance, his highest rating in more than three years. [The New York Times]

No, Trump isn't winning. Yes, the election will be competitive. And Nate Silver: You are still worth reading.

Bernie Sanders made a huge mistake this week. It's one that, if not soon corrected, could squander the sizeable influence he has over his party's platform, and, more indelibly, create for the eventual Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a schism in the party that she does not have the means to reconcile.

The error: Bernie's campaign became a vehicle to advance Bernie Sanders' vainglory and cult of personality. His staff responded irresponsibly to violence at the state caucuses in Nevada. He compounded their tone deaf responses by wrapping a muted condemnation of the chaos inside a long justification of the complaints that caused it.

Clinton won Nevada by six points on Feb. 20. The rules for delegate selection are clear. They are complex but they are not opaque. Sanders knew them going in to the race, and by accepting delegates, he has signed on to their legitimacy. He can protest them and try to revise them, but he cannot, in good conscience, urge his supporters to ignore them — or to find them unfair, inter alia, as the stakes change.

But before you accuse me of not understanding what really was at stake, let me explain for you the reason why Sanders's supporters got so angry.

The rules say that the chairperson of the state convention can call for a voice vote to approve the adoption of the credentials report — basically a list of delegate identities submitted by each campaign. The chairperson of the Nevada State Convention, Roberta Lange, did just that. The room erupted. Sanders's supporters were angry that the credentials report had enshrined the selection of many more Clinton supporters than Sanders supporters, and they loudly tried to "no" vote the approval process. Lange reasoned — reasonably — that the volume of the nays did not reflect the size of the nay vote. (Indeed, there were more Clinton supporters in the room.) Only Lange can decide whether to call for a roll call vote, or some other mechanism. Those are the rules. Even as Sanders supporters screamed at her, spitting cusses in her direction, she decided not to. That's her prerogative. Those are the rules.

A responsible answer to this chaos from the Sanders campaign would have been to say: "We think the rules are unfair and did not give voice to our supporters, and we will try to revise the rules to make sure that this doesn't happen again."

That is not the answer that Sanders's campaign gave. Instead, they (once again) questioned the legitimacy of the party. Questioning the legitimacy of the institution that you've chosen to work inside of is tantamount to a call for a revolt. If the DNC and its proxies are not legitimate, then, indeed, the election IS being stolen from Bernie Sanders, and since a hell of a lot IS at stake, then agitation verging on violence is pretty much the only alternative short of going home and giving up.

It's fine for Sanders supporters in the heat of battle to believe this, but it is beyond irresponsible for Sanders's campaign to encourage the provenance of this view. Why? Because it's not true. It simply isn't. The rules are not rigged in favor of or against any particular candidate. They can't be. They were set long before the candidates entered the race. They haven't been capriciously changed. Indeed, they are skewed in FAVOR of Sanders: He has received more delegates than his popular vote totals should see him allocated, assuming that, as he does, the only real form of democracy is direct. Or maybe not: He has repeatedly said that the party does a disservice when it doesn't allow independents to vote in its primaries. And he has also said that he represents the "working people" — the "working people" only vote for him. (Do Clinton supporters not work?)

His campaign is descending into semiotic babble. He is creating unrealistic expectations for his supporters. If those expectations cannot be met by a reconciliation, and if the party truly cannot convince a large number of Sanders delegates that they have been treated fairly, then his delegates could cause real trouble at the convention. They could prevent Clinton from uniting the party. They could prevent Sanders from keeping the party accountable for its promises to voters. They could nullify the very real power Sanders has right now to remold the party in the image of the type of candidate who is independent and more attentive to working class voters.

In other words, his blinders, put upon him by campaign staff and other hangers-on, are hurting his cause right now. I've vacillated about whether a responsible Democrat should want Sanders to stay in the race, given that his chances of winning the nomination by accumulating delegates are vanishingly small, and that his arguments that superdelegates should follow the expressed will of their state's voters have fallen largely on the back of necks — ears have turned away. For me, it came to down to the future of the party. If Sanders's movement was best served by his presence in the race, he should stay in. If not, he should bow out. For a while, his victories in demographically appropriate states, his willingness to tone down his attacks against Clinton, his musings about building the party's bench down the ballot — all of these pointed to a man with mature instincts for a tempered use of his considerable power.

Even his supporters know: Bernie's campaign isn't about them. It's about policies. It's about removing the influence of big money in politics. It's about fairer trade. It's about an American manufacturing renaissance. It's about, in other words, stuff for other people. The moment it becomes about him is the moment he needs to make it about that other stuff again. Time is running out.

Having internally conceded West Virginia to Bernie Sanders Tuesday, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign may have gotten an unexpected jolt from an exit poll result.

Forty-four percent of those voting for Sanders told the surveyists that they'd vote for Republican Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the fall.

So eye-opening was that statistic that at least two news organizations flashed it to the world as breaking news. It appears to confirm the worst fears of Democrats who support Clinton — that she is far too beatable in the fall — and, of course, reifies the standard rationale for Sanders' continued presence in the race.

Fortunately, Team Clinton can take comfort: This particular exhibit of agita in the electorate is not something that will doom her in the fall. Then, after taking comfort, they can start to focus on stuff that really ought to sober them up.

Here's what Clinton ought to be afraid of — and what she can safely ignore.

First, that stat. Don't sweat it.

The Democratic electorate in West Virginia is quite conservative. It was quite offended by Clinton's correct, if impertinently expressed jibes at the demise of coal country. ("We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.") As ABC News summarized the primary electorate: "The highest level of economic concern in any Democratic primary this year and greater-than-usual turnout among men, whites, political independents, and critics of President Obama characterized Hillary Clinton's challenges in the West Virginia primary." A majority of voters had a negative view of trade; a third of all voters are directly tied to the coal industry and they overwhelmingly voted for Sanders, who is a free trade skeptic. If there was a state Clinton deserved to lose, it was West Virginia.

Simply put, that state will continue to undergo wrenching change — most of it unrelated to trade, some of it related to the Democratic emphasis on renewable energy sources — regardless of who becomes president.

But Clinton should worry about the economically aggrieved within her own party — in many other states, close to half of Democratic primary voters felt that the Obama economy had left them behind. They might not identify it as such, but it's a particular challenge for Clinton: She must embrace Obama and his policies without seeming tone deaf to the much larger structural challenges that have set back American workers and continue to drag down their perceptions about their economic futures.

She shouldn't worry about Obama himself, though. And she shouldn't truly worry that Bernie Sanders' supporters in other states will vote for Donald Trump en masse. Nothing would be more — let me put it simply — contrary to their self-interest, and they know it.

In this age of meta-media, we might be inclined to tell exit pollsters what we think the opposing candidate might need to hear. Nothing registers a protest as loudly as a Sanders liberal promising to vote for Donald Trump.

But Trump, even with his recent bleats about raising taxes on the rich, will not win by courting liberals, or by adopting their policies. As the Republican Party coalesces around him, he is much more likely to fall back onto orthodox Republican economic policies, while Clinton has already been pulled to the left by Sanders and is promising some hefty new purchases for disaffected voters.

Clinton should not worry, generically, about Donald Trump's appeal to women. She should worry very specifically about a charge he will make: Trump said this weekend, and has said repeatedly, that Bill Clinton "is fair game." That means his personal peccadillos are "fair game." That means, specifically for Hillary Clinton, that the women who accused Clinton of sexual misconduct will find their charges given a second airing by Trump. Trump will accuse Hillary Clinton of using her power and stature to bury these women — to prevent them from getting a fair shot at justice. He will do this repeatedly; he will do this loudly. Clinton must have an efficient and effective response for this charge.

Clinton should not worry about pundits who like to say that this election will feature the two most unpopular nominees in the history of polling. A good president need not be popular, and Trump has no solid plan to emerge from his abyss of negative attributes. Clinton is polling at her lowest, thanks to a bruising primary. She will become less disliked as these numbers stabilize.

But she should worry if she lets these concerns get in the way of her making the race a big one. By that I mean: Every tactic, proposal, policy maneuver, vector, change — all should be on the table. She must treat Donald Trump as if he were an imminent threat to the country. She cannot run the race as a frontrunner. She cannot rest on mathematics of the electoral map, which are broadly in her favor, but which could flip on a dime. She cannot be cautious about losing what she's built already. Trump has nowhere to go but up; his ability to master the media frustrates her campaign, but instead of complaining about it, they must figure out how to beat it back.

The Libertarian Party should be having its runway moment: Ballot access in all 50 states. A plausible front-runner for its nomination who served as an actual governor and ran a profitable business. A deep-pocketed set of billionaires, including the Koch brothers, who would spend money if they thought it would make a difference. Mainstream parties getting ready to select their most unpopular nominees in years. Massive squalls of internet-fueled indignation over the seeming failure of the Democratic and Republican parties to align themselves with Americans' sensibilities. The Wall Street bailout. The failure of government at all levels in Flint, Michigan.

And yet, not even Donald Trump, and the hole that his nomination blows out of the center of the Republican Party, has been enough to convince voters to give the party a second look. The media has begun to write its cursory stories, which only serves to convince libertarians that the fix is in: As long as you've checked the "we did cover the libertarians, once!" box, you can go back to the click-bait and ratings vehicle that is Donald J. Trump. Still, libertarians are worried that they're going to mess up their biggest chance in years to earn eyeballs.

One long-time party activist told me that he wonders whether the party is ready for prime-time.

The party poo-bahs — yes, even the Libertarians have poo-bahs — want former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson to be their nominee when the party conferences in Orlando later this month. He is facing several spirited and interesting challengers, including John McAfee, the computer researcher who has to tell people that he didn't murder his neighbor, usually on first reference. McAfee spent a while on the lam, and is using his bid to gain influence and a measure of respect. He wants to re-legitimize himself, but he's a bit of an anarchist gadfly. That helps people take Johnson more seriously.

So there was Johnson, on ABC's This Week, making the case. "Be Libertarian with me," is his slogan. He doesn't poll well because he's not in the polls, he says. If only the pollsters would include his name. Americans by many measures are clustering around positions traditionally considered to be libertarian: stronger support for gun rights, an openness to drug legalization, a wide recognition that prison and sentencing reform are civil rights issues, a recoil over government surveillance. We may have always been libertarian by temperament, but now we are becoming operationally, functionally, more libertarian too.

This should give the party a deep well of voters to pick off. A plurality of Americans identifies as independents. It seems like a lot of them would be libertarians if they had a winning chance; those who supported Ron and Rand Paul in successive Republican primaries; college kids with time on their hands and money to donate; even Republican financial and business types who can't stomach Donald Trump's anti-trade venom. And what about gays? Only one party has supported gay rights since Stonewall, and it hasn't been the Democrats.

Alas, the party has had trouble organizing seriously around any principle other than pot. Johnson was a successful governor by any measure. He is now the CEO of a company that sells primo cannabis. He is also a bit unpredictable, which by the standards of this cycle, isn't disqualifying at all, but weirdness without sizzle is just not very compelling.

The party's fiscal conservative policy planks, always fuzzier than — and downplayed in favor of — its leave-us-alone-stands on social issues, are out of synch of with what Americans say they want from government. There is no real "Libertarian" view on foreign policy; Johnson seems to be all over the map.

It is absolutely true that the two-party system has rigged the game. The Commission on Presidential Debates has no legal authority, and its 15 percent polling standard for making it onto the rostrum is absurdly high.

But the Libertarians aren't well-suited to American politics. Politics is transactional; goods, services, and rights are distributed and redistributed to satisfy competing demands and pressures. We elect people to give us the stuff we want, whether that's stuff that makes our lives easier or makes life harder for the guys we don't like. Drugs aside, libertarians reject interest-group politics on principle, which makes them ill-suited to argue that gay voters might enjoy a better world in the near-term if they supported libertarians. Yes, Hillary Clinton evolved later on gay marriage than, say, the libertarian nominee each year her husband ran for office, but gays have done well by Democrats and Democrats have done well by gays, and that's pretty much that.

We may be living in a libertarian moment. But so far, it's not the Libertarians' moment.

Maybe that's the wrong question to start off with. First of all: Do you even have any spare time?

I know it's not fashionable to admit to it; we are always supposed to be working, because work is how we define ourselves. Unless you live in Los Angeles, have digested Tim Ferris' The 4-Hour Work Week, or happen to be employed at Google, you probably equate your idle hours with the opposite of work; we might enjoy our leisure time, but we aren't really supposed to like enjoying it.

Well, I like enjoying it. I particularly enjoy listening to the police scanner. I sit, and listen; it adds nothing to my life that I can quantify for you; I can't really tell you why I like to do it, and it has no meaningful impact on anyone else. Still, I spend hours each week listening to that scanner. It never occurred to me that I could make money off of it; I derived enough pleasure from it to be satisfied by the mere activity itself.

The Internet of Things, however, had something else in mind for my hobby. First, probably because I tend to like photographs of police cars and fire trucks on Instagram, the service pushed an advertisement to my feed for an app called Stringr. With Stringr, anyone who has a phone capable of shooting in HD can upload video that professional news organizations, or, really, anyone, might want to buy. CNN and other media companies have been purchasing crowd-sourced footage for years, but this app, so far as I can tell, is the first to try and create a circle around that activity, match buyers to sellers, and take a cut of the profits. I downloaded Stringr a few weeks ago. It sat, idle, until a recent weekend.

On that Sunday afternoon, the building across the street from mine caught fire. I didn't catch the dispatch; the scanner was in a different room, and I was unpacking some boxes. But I happened to check another app — PulsePoint, which connects directly to the 911 call centers for more than 60 cities, and lists the active incidents in real time — and noticed an entry for a residential structure fire at the top of the feed. It was at that point that I realized that the sirens I'd heard a few minutes ago were close by, and that a faint odor in the air might be smoke. There was an active fire across the street. I grabbed my phone, went outside, and started to shoot video. This was simply out of habit. The fire had darkened by the time I got there, but I could still see black smoke coughing out of a window. Aerial ladders brocaded the building and hand-lines stretched through lower-floor windows.

At that point, I remembered Stringr. In Los Angeles, a market with at least seven different local television news operations, original footage of a fire can be valuable. (Jake Gyllenhall's Nightcrawler, about the lengths to which professional video stringers in the city go to sell their footage, is only thinly exaggerated.) It had never occurred to me to shoot footage of a fire to sell it to a station; I'm just a buff; I'm into this sort of thing. But now, suddenly, I had the means to make some cheddar. It took about four minutes before my video was uploading to the site.

The next day, a Stringr curator based in Los Angeles emailed me directly. The footage I had sent was great, he wrote, but he advised me to shoot it horizontally, not vertically. Later that day, a notification from Stringr pinged on my phone: Someone in the area would pay $40 for exterior footage of Hulu's headquarters. If I had been close to Hulu — it's in Santa Monica, and I'm in Hollywood — I would have driven there, shot the video, and claimed the money.

Is there something sacrilegious about turning a hobby into a more economically productive endeavor? The gurus I read tend to be split on this issue. Some believe that "me" time should be distinct and separate; others tend to speak in terms of optimal functions, as if it is our duty to spend as much time contributing directly to the world as possible, even if we do it only because we want to make more money to have more things.

I have the feeling I am participating in something much larger than myself. I am not sure whether that is good for me or not.

As the Republican Party writes its obituary (dead, at 162, from extreme resentment-itis?), the Democratic Party is left to ponder the possibility of its own contested convention, an eventuality triggered by a candidate who has become a movement, set in opposition to a frontrunner who has become, most unusually, mistrusted. Still, they'd rather be Ds than Rs right now. So here's a constructive suggestion: Democrats should focus on those who are disadvantaged.

With a 300 pledged delegate deficit, it remains as difficult for Bernie Sanders to win the nomination as it did before Tuesday night; the vagaries of the nominating calendar have once again conferred the illusion of momentum where none exists. (Remember: Hillary Clinton won Kentucky and West Virginia by blowout margins in 2008 — her last hurrah.) Having made his point, having blasted past all predicted thresholds and blockades, and having indelibly left his mark on the future of his party, the senator from Vermont will arrive in Philadelphia with, as his amen corner at The Nation notes, more delegates than any insurgent in the party's history.

He will not leave the city with the nomination. But he could wind up being more responsible for electing Democrats in 2016 than the person who will be at the top of the ticket.

Sanders has raised, by the tally of the FEC, $185.9 million, and spent $168.3 million, on a campaign he will lose. Most of that money, as we know, comes from small donors. He has proved that a small donor base can fund a major party presidential candidate in the era of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision about corporations, contributions, and free speech that Democrats worried would crush their party's ability to keep pace with Republicans. (Clinton has raised $262 million, more than $100 million of which comes from small donors, too, and her super PAC has raised $76 million to date).

Although the Democrats managed to do fine, financially, in 2012, party insiders say that the effect below the level of national visibility has been devastating. Republicans, they say, have a lopsided advantage in legislative races, in races for state supreme court justices, and in other contests that are hard to watchdog.

If Bernie Sanders turns loose his self-funding army by identifying the 100 most important down-ballot races, and directing his contributors to assess and give if they so choose, he could be responsible for leveling that playing field. Generally, the nominee is responsible for raising money for the lower echelons of the ticket, but Sanders is raising money the way that Democrats will raise money in the future, and there's nothing in the law that would prevent him from devoting some or all of his time after the convention to helping these candidates raise money.

If you're a Democrat, this is uber important. The GOP now controls more state legislative seats than it's had in a century. It controls a majority of state legislatures outright. And "more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state," too. Solving hard problems requires cooperation between states and the federal government, and, as we've seen with Medicare expansion, among other bread-and-butter issues, those dogs won't hunt if states are implacably cast as conservative and defiant in their governance.

Democrats need to begin winning these races if they have any hope of correcting the perceived imbalances in redistricting, which might help them win back the House of Representatives; voting rights are being challenged across the country precisely because the Democratic Party is powerless to prevent Republicans from rewriting election laws. So is abortion rights. So is organized labor.

A President Bernie Sanders can do nothing about this revanchist march. Only down-ballot Democrats can.

And that's why, if he's going to do anything other than promote himself and his own brand, Sanders should focus less on the Democratic platform at the national level, and more on electing Democrats at the state level. He is the most powerful Democratic politician today, aside from the president. He can, if he chooses, use his power to great effect.

And indeed, with Ted Cruz's sudden departure from the race on Tuesday night, in the wake of his crushing Indiana defeat, the GOP is left facing the near-certainty that their nominee for president will be Donald Trump.

The Republic is not ending, President Obama's joke this past weekend notwithstanding. Catastrophic thinking is all the rage these days, and I'd like to try a little bit of a cognitive behavioral intervention on the masses.

You may be worried that because nothing has stopped Trump yet, nothing will stop him. Or because elections are always close, this one will be close. Because Hillary Clinton is the one candidate who's nearly as unpopular as Trump, she has no advantages; because the American people are capable of acting selfishly and narrowly and reacting with rage….

These thoughts make you feel afraid. Or they leave you in a state of high irony, where you turn to your Facebook feed for satirical solace. Or depression. Or anger.

Your confidence in the integrity of these beliefs and feelings is quite high. You're about 80 percent sure that you're right.

Trump wouldn't have become the nominee unless the electorate was extraordinary unsettled, and in the mood for blood; he's going to open up an equally unsettling and nasty campaign against Hillary Clinton, who might be indicted for her role in mishandling classified information; white people are going to revolt against eight years of Barack Obama's policies, which favor the non-white and the non-advantaged; Clinton will be a conventional candidate who is quite unsuited to run in an age where moments matter more than stories.

Take a deep breath. Slow down.

Still, you think, nothing has stopped Trump yet, so nothing will stop him. He appeals to working-class voters. A Republican Party that nominates him is out of for blood and will stop at nothing. He's bringing new voters into the party, for goodness sake. Clinton is terribly flawed.

These fears are unfounded. Let's unpack them.

No one has stopped Trump yet. Well, okay. But ask yourself: Did the Republicans put forward any candidate with the guts to take Trump on when it mattered? Did they not stop Trump because Trump best reflects the party as it's currently constituted? Was Trump, far from being a surprise nominee, the inevitable nominee? Is there a plausible case to be made that someone might have stopped Trump had they intervened earlier, or done something differently, or if the Republican leadership hadn't spent 10 years promising things they knew they couldn't deliver?

Trump appeals to working-class whites who traditionally vote Republican in general elections. That's a true statement. It is also true that a not insignificant percentage of Bernie Sanders voters told exit pollsters they'd vote for Donald Trump in a general election instead of Hillary Clinton. So you're worried that white voters are going to revolt. That Trump is going to be uber-popular among them. While it's true that Trump may get a higher percentage of white voters than Mitt Romney got— 60, 61 percent, maybe — there's a strong ceiling to the success a Republican candidate can have if he only appeals to white voters. There's even a ceiling on the percentage of white voters Trump can possibly turn out. White voters don't exist in little vacuum-sealed packets; they might turn out at higher numbers, but if they do, they probably will not turn out at higher rates, because Trump provokes so much opposition among non-white voters. And we've seen that opposition to a candidate is generally a larger driver of these marginal increases. Trump needs a real coalition to win in November — one he has a poor (but nonzero) chance of building.

A Republican Party that nominates Trump is out for blood. True — and a Democratic Party that faces him is out for blood, too. This is kind of a wash. Does Donald Trump inspire less fear and loathing than Hillary Clinton? Really?

He's bringing in so many new voters. Actually, more people have cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. There is no evidence he is bringing in new Republican voters; he's just awakening dormant Republican voters that would have been there for him in the general election anyway.

Hillary Clinton is terribly flawed by comparison to Donald Trump. This is nonsense. Her message, to an electorate that needs to hear compassion for their economic anxieties, has been refined, and will be further refined. She is unlikely to get indicted. She has shown herself to be more flexible than she's been given credit for. Trump may have been able to get his supporters to overlook his own record of questionably treating blue-collar workers, but Democrats will make sure that Bernie Sanders supporters are given that information. Clinton is eminently more qualified, and demonstrably less flawed, than Trump.

So take a deep breath. Relax. It's going to be okay. The end of the world is not at hand.

On first glance, everything seemed to go swimmingly for Hillary Clinton in New York last week, and foreshadowed a big Empire State victory for her in the general election. In the primary, she earned more than 1 million votes — nearly double the 525,000 of Donald Trump. Plus, she's a Democrat. She's a New Yorker. She'll crush him there in the fall, right? And then sweep to victory in a massive electoral landslide unlike anything we've seen since 1984?

Well, possibly. Maybe even probably. But don't bank on it.

Lots of pundits have posited that Trump could actually beat Clinton in New York. Most of them make a variant of two arguments: One, his appeal to white working class voters is strong; two: he's more of a rough-and-tumble, born-and-bred New Yorker than she is, and has a stronger claim to the state. Both of these arguments are trivially true.

Furthermore, the New York primary was closed — no independents allowed — and because Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York state by a two-to-one margin, Hillary's big vote total was exactly what one would expect her to get if she had the same level of organic support among Democrats as Trump did among Republicans.

There's another caveat: Trump ran against two other candidates; Clinton ran against only one. That further dilutes the strength of her victory.

And another: Polls show that the independent voters who couldn't vote because of New York's primary rules would have supported either Trump or Bernie Sanders; very few would have chosen Clinton.

A final nugget from the exit polls: 20 percent of Sanders supporters say they'd support Trump in the fall over Clinton.

Still, I firmly believe Clinton will win New York in November. Here are four reasons:

1. The group of people who vote in primaries overlaps with, but is smaller than, the group of people who vote in the general election. It is very hard to make an argument about the general election based upon any particular aggregation of facts about primaries. On principal, I tend to caution people against reading too far ahead.

2. Yes, Trump has managed to bring into the primary fold a bunch of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who ordinarily only vote in general elections. But in the general, these people only vote for Republicans. They call themselves independents, but they are functionally Republicans. This does not say much of anything about his ability to expand the party's coalition in the fall.

4. Every general election poll I've seen of New York has Clinton leading by double digits. Trump would have to win an overwhelming majority of working class whites, and somehow manage to shrink Clinton's expected margin of victory among black voters and Latinos in New York City. (He could do this by suppressing the vote — somehow — or by appealing to it — somehow). He'd have to swing women to him in Nassau and Westchester counties; it's hard to see how or what Clinton could do that could possibly alienate these voters so pungently.

Unless she's indicted by the Justice Department for her role in mishandling classified information.

Yes, that potentiality — an extremely small one, based on what we know the facts to be, but one that does exist — is what animates a lot of this catastrophic thinking.

A lot of Democrats seem to assume that Clinton will be much more vulnerable in the fall than she is even now, when her favorability ratings are lower than any candidate except for Trump.

Plenty of people think Trump is going to run a scorched-earth campaign against Clinton, that he will try to bury her among women by pointing out how Clinton shunned and tried to discredit women who accused President Clinton of misdeeds. That by November, Clinton will inevitably be much weaker than she is now, and that she might lose blue states like New York as a result.

Bernie Sanders' path to the Democratic presidential nomination is now as blocked as an artery filled with hardened butter, and the Vermont senator is having a hard time convincing the cognoscenti that he should stay in the race.

The democratic socialist's point, the pundits say, has been made. His influence pulled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the left. His presence in the race forced her to oppose trade agreements she otherwise would have supported, and to make far-reaching promises on issues as disparate as college tuition and campaign finance reform. He's made her a better campaigner, forcing her to confront the pandemic of anxiety that even Democratic base voters feel, the relative macro-health of the economy notwithstanding.

Sanders' campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently made a lame attempt to justify Sanders' continued presence in the race by the absence of Clinton's support among independents. Superdelegates, he said, will be persuaded that only Sanders can put together the coalition needed to beat Donald Trump in the fall.

That's hogwash.

The better answer as to why Sanders ought to stay in the race has little to do with Hillary Clinton, and nothing to do with the presidency. But it has everything to do with the future of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party, he writes, is "more like a centrist, interest group brokerage party that seeks to mediate between the claims and concerns of left-wing activists groups and those of important members of the business community — especially industries like finance, Hollywood, and tech that are based in liberal coastal states and whose executives generally espouse a progressive outlook on cultural change."

I'll take this a step further. The current Democratic elite is transactional with these interest groups. These transactions are at the heart of what alienates the Sanders coalition — not just because they lack a soul but because they reify the institutional barriers to participation and engagement that prevent people from flourishing.

People who are disenfranchised — through unjust laws, immigration status, arcane and archaic election mechanics, gerrymandering, racism, classism, governmental neglect, lack of education, incarceration, and so on — don't deserve their fate being determined this way.

And yet, "this way” is what Hillary Clinton represents to many, many of these young voters and their allies.

Imagine for a moment that you are an undocumented immigrant, or a passionate advocate for them. You'd hope that the strongest possible Democratic candidate would be elected in the fall, one who would appoint a Supreme Court justice would who uphold President Obama's executive action on immigration; one who might, given the right Republican opponent, change the color of the quarks in Congress just enough to make significant headway on immigration reform. Hillary Clinton would be that candidate. And indeed, her support from the pro-reform immigration institutionalists is strong.

But you've also got a long memory. You remember, back in 2008, when she was late on immigration. She was as late on immigration as she was on gay rights. And now she's pandering to Latinos.

You remember, not too long ago, when she supported sending Central American children refugees back to their home countries, back to (what you imagine to be) their certain deaths; or when she opposed driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants because that was the strong position to take at the time. And now she's hugging a crying citizen child of immigrants, comforting her and saying she will make sure her mommy is not deported.

You just don't trust Hillary Clinton with your future.

You don't hate her; you hate the transactional politics she represents. And Bernie Sanders — he's not perfect, but man, if given the chance to pop a balloon in the middle of Easter Mass, you would. Because the future of the party belongs to you, not to people of Clinton's generation.

It's hard to argue with the notion that a person who shares these beliefs wouldn't want Sanders to stay in the race as long as possible, if only to make sure that the next presidential race is fought on more hospitable territory to candidates like him.

This argument founders on the shoals for a few reasons. One is that it endorses the transactional politics that it purports to disdain. The other is that it lacks — like many of Sanders' pronouncements — necessary details. It's an argument for change without a plan for change. It may be possible in 20 years to build a Democratic Party that is funded only by small donors, that reflects a strong left-wing consensus, that is led by social justice warriors, and that can elect politicians who are one with the force. But we're nowhere near that yet. And all other things being equal, most people inside the Democratic Party will vote with their interests in mind, and not with a grander, humanistic conception of a freer future.

They don't want to send a message; they want to win. Winning makes their lives marginally better. Sending messages makes them feel better.

Still, I get it. I get it more than I've gotten it before. The authors of this political revolution will determine how it proceeds. The cognoscienti won't.

Let me be the first to say this: The 2016 Republican National Convention is not, and will not be, about whether the Republicans nominate a candidate who can win the presidency.

I'll say it again: The GOP convention is not about selecting the next would-be, could-be president.

In normal years, of course. This year, it won't be.

The question on which the convention will turn, most likely, assumes that the presidency is lost. It also assumes, for the sake of preserving their own sanity, that everything else isn't — that there's a chance that the GOP can still salvage some of their power.

So when Republicans ask, can we win in November if Donald Trump is our nominee, what they're really asking is: Well, it may be too late to save the presidency, but can Republicans retain the Senate with Trump at the top of the ticket? Can they keep Democrats from whipping up enough anti-Trump sentiment in marginal House districts to make that chamber competitive?

If the answer is no, then they will nominate someone else.

Republicans will consider this question twice in July. The first time it will be debated internally is before the convention begins. The RNC's rules committee will determine whether to expand the number of candidates who are eligible for the nomination. They can decide whether to scrap Rule 40, which requires presidential nominees to have won five contests, and replace it with something else. There will be no reason for either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz's hand-chosen rules committee members to vote in favor of any change, so if the rest of the rules committee does, it means they think that the party's control of everything is in serious jeopardy with either man as their nominee.

Then the delegates will decide. They'll look at the polls: If both Trump and Cruz are not competitive with the likely Democratic nominee, they will nominate someone else — or nominate the person who is most likely to do the least amount of damage.

As a long-time watcher of how the cognoscenti makes up their collective mind, I get the feeling that a number of Beltway Republicans are resigned to the notion that running with Trump might actually help save their own candidates down the line. Most of them will have financial stakes in some of the races, and so they're thinking now: Who's easy to throw under the bus? And who is likely to gin up turnout in some of the places we care about? The answer to both of those questions is Donald Trump.

They weren't playacting. In Brooklyn on Thursday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders went all in, with a high-risk, high-reward strategy, with the rewards accruing to him, and the risk consisting of the type of attack against Hillary Clinton that might stick to her in a general election.

To win the nomination, Sanders has to earn close to the same number of delegates that Clinton has already grossed, and to do that, he must score an upset victory in New York next Tuesday. To do that, he needed to do more than simply generate momentum. He had to intervene, take action decisively, and change the direction of the race. Among most Democrats, the die is cast; they think Clinton will be the nominee.

Sanders' string of recent victories has won him more money and positive press coverage, and has served to gin up resentment on many of your Facebook friends' pages. But Sanders' run of victories, particularly in smallish caucus states, haven't actually imparted any momentum to his campaign because Clinton consistently wins more actual votes and more actual delegates.

Thursday's debate was his final shot. He didn't really Kobe it, but he tried. He used everything he had, and more, even attempting to make the case the Obama administration (and Clinton) hadn't recognized the dignity of the Palestinians, or that Clinton was following Sanders by moving left on Social Security. (Not so.)

The edges of Sanders' case against Clinton are surprisingly soft, a jarring contrast to the high decibel level that he uses to make the charges. Clinton is beholden to her donors, he claims. She's the avatar of "the Wall Street economy," a proponent of a "rigged" system that Democrats must reject. And yet, when given the opportunity to point to specific policies that Clinton chose, or examples of quid pro quo, he chose instead to point to the speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs.

Those speeches are bad for Clinton, but they don't even approach the threshold for lending plausibility to his argument. Sanders' case against Clinton is plausible because of a pre-existing impression that many Democrats have (or fear is true) about the former secretary of state: that she'll say and do anything to win. Because he can't find actual facts to fit this argument, though, it rings hollow to everyone except people who already believe it. And it suggests, rather plainly, that Clinton is no more or less corrupt than anyone else inside the system — a system that Sanders himself is working to reform from the inside.

Clinton's refusal to release the Goldman Sachs speeches is either dumb or a calculated risk, or both. She has said she'll be happy to release the speeches when everyone else releases the texts of speeches they've given, falling back on a "one size should fit all" standard. No, no, and no. What Clinton told rich Wall Street executives is more germane by virtue of the facts of the Democratic debate. The standard is one of interest, not of fairness. By not releasing the speeches, she (and she must know this) gives every impression that she soft-sold her own view of the evilness of Big Money. Her own voting record suggests otherwise, which means that the speeches are either boring, or they contain a few cute turns of phrases that anyone who has ever given a corporate speech understands. No matter; the speeches need to speak for themselves.

While there's probably nothing in the speeches that would incriminate Clinton, I think there probably is something in at least one speech that might embarrass her given the reality of the rest of the primary race. Perhaps she praised Goldman's commitment to corporate governance (at some point); perhaps she praised trade deals that Goldman favors (and she now opposes); perhaps she recognized the role that Goldman Sachs and others play in generating liquidity in our economy, and in ensuring that businesses can invest and take risks and hire more people. The speeches will come out before the election; they'll do so after Bernie Sanders has conceded the race to her. That's my guess.

And where are we now? We're back where we started. Sanders won the debate; he had to win the debate. He made a case against Clinton that sounds strong to those who buy what Sanders is selling. But he did not earn himself any new customers.

With just 44 percent of the vote in Ohio on Tuesday night, genial John Kasich may have roadblocked Donald Trump's path to an uncontested Republican nomination. Now, the Republican frontrunner might not get the 1,237 delegates he needs before July's GOP convention in Cleveland.

Those numbers are tough. But even tougher, for Trump: identifying and seating the actual delegates themselves. And Trump, by disrespecting the state Republican parties in the states he's won, smacked a huge target onto the backs of those valet-chosen silk suits he wears.

Trump has been inattentive to the mechanics of voter identification and field persuasion. His brand of politics has allowed him to run roughshod over his opponents by sheer force of personality. He has spit in the face of the national party and has publicly cast aspersions on state parties, too, accusing them of stacking debate audiences with donors to favor his opponents. This plays well with his angry electorate, but it comes with a huge price: In order to make sure that his delegates remain loyal, he needs the state parties to cooperate with him.

"I warned them," a state GOP chairman messaged me last night. "It may be too late."

Instead of calling all 168 members of the Republican National Committee last year or forging at least quiet alliances with state chairs, Trump's "campaign continually harassed and cajoled dozens of state chairs into staying silent, holding the loss of business relationships or donors over their heads," the chair said.

Two other GOP chairs confirmed this assessment in separate messages to me last night.

For weeks now, Republican operatives who oppose Trump have begun an effort to identify the men and women in each state who will likely be slated as Trump's delegates to the nomination. Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign has its own state-by-state delegate identification and selection effort. So far, state chairs say they've heard next to nothing from Trump's campaign.

This matters in states as small as North Dakota and as large as Michigan.

Last Tuesday, Trump won 36.5 percent of the vote in Michigan, earning himself 25 delegates at the national convention. But the identity of those delegates is key. And they're not yet known, because Michigan selects its national convention delegates at a state caucus on April 8 from a pool of at least several hundred Michigan Republicans.

Though those delegates will be bound by national and state rules to support Trump through the first ballot at the convention, their identities might be the difference between a first ballot win and a complete loss — the election of someone else.

It's entirely plausible that a state could seat delegates pledged to support Donald Trump who have open affiliations with other candidates. The attendees at these state caucuses and conventions can elect whomever they want. This happens all the time. In 2012, according to a great explainer by Frontloader, folks who disliked Mitt Romney not only messed with the number of pledged delegates he was to seat, but they also worked to install their own partisans as his delegates. They did this not to mess him up at the convention — his victory might have been a foregone conclusion. But conventions are big, fun parties. Paid, expensive parties. You can understand why rival factions within a state party would want to reward as many members of their own tribe as possible.

The RNC's rules committee has tried to address this by tightening the rules governing the allocation of pledged delegates: The proportion of pledged delegates actually sent to the convention must align with the proportion actually won by a candidate in states that don't give their winners all of their delegates.

But states still get a lot of latitude. That's why smart (and devious) Republican operatives are secretly working to influence the delegate selection process. They want as many of their own supporters as possible to identify as pledged Trump delegates. That way, those men and women will fall to their (real) default choice if Trump doesn't win a majority of delegates on the first ballot.

Sabotage is not out of the question either. What happens if a pledged delegate decides not to show up for the first ballot? He or she might lose their status — but Trump doesn't automatically get that vote.

Manipulating the delegate selection process won't be enough to propel Ted Cruz or John Kasich to the nomination by itself. But a few persuadable delegates in the right states at the right moment could tip the ballot in their favor down the line.

So, I read an article in The New York Times that said you're developing plans to drop Donald Trump like a "hot rock" if he wins your party's nomination. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that you've been convinced by your pollsters and consultants that a Trump nomination would lead to an inevitable victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton, but of more concern to you, a Democratic Senate in 2017, and you'd be out of a key job. In your thinking, it would be better to have a Democratic president with a Republican Senate than a Democratic president, backed by a Democratic Senate, who can nominate and confirm liberal judges and basically rule by executive fiat, just as the dreaded Obama has in his somewhat astoundingly successful second term.

And I hear you. You talk a little slowly for my ears, but I hear you.

I also think that, in the end, you're going to change your mind. If Donald Trump is going to be the nominee of your party, I think you're going to learn to live with it. Here's why:

1. Trump could win

Many of your consultants are not very good. Some are, but most aren't. If any of these consultants have made millions off of televisions ads this cycle, don't listen to them. TV ads don't work. Donald Trump's rise and buoyancy, and the empty wallets of Jeb Bush donors, should suggest to you that a lot (but not all) of modern political consulting is a scam. And so, despite what the consultants tell you, Trump could actually take this thing. But critically, sir: He'd need your help to do it. He'll need your ground game, and your coordination, especially in those swing states with Senate races. He'll need the Republican Party's voter file, which, let's be real, you and Speaker Ryan have to share with him eventually.

If you help Trump register and turn out white voters without college degrees in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in Wisconsin, he could win one of those states. If you begin to notice that he's actually competitive in these states by the end of the summer, when people begin to pay real attention, it is going to occur to you that he might be competitive elsewhere — and that this gut feeling you have about voters not electing a pompous bigoted blowhard might not be correct. A few percentage points worth of increased Republican enthusiasm in seven states could flip the electoral college on its ass. We just won't know until we know...

2. Hillary Clinton will concentrate the minds of Republicans who hate Trump

The elite of the party dislikes Trump, and many are debating whether he'd be worse than Hillary Clinton. But your party has decided for you already: They're going to dislike Clinton more than they dislike Trump. Enough Republicans who would never openly admit to voting for Trump will vote for Trump to avoid voting for Clinton. In this age of negative polarization, we get more pleasure out of beating the other guy than we do in savoring a victory anyway. That means that your voters will feel more intense about Clinton than they will about Trump. And if there's some evidence that the race might actually be close, they'll become giddy. And if they become giddy, they'll become motivated. Speaking of motivated...

3. Trump's rise is fueled by anger towards you

Surely you know this, right? So imagine what your party will do if you actively work against its nominee and cause him to fail. I mean, seriously? If you think Trump is a threat to the party, or you think you're uncomfortable now, just wait until you try to attend a state party meeting that's now controlled by Trump delegates. Think of how angry Republicans will be. Why would you risk that?

4. You won't risk it because Trump is the candidate you have

I know he's not the candidate you want. I know his image does not fit with the Republican Party's image that you say you're trying to build, but frankly, although you personally have a very solid record on civil rights, your party has done everything it could to bring about the type of revolt whose only logical consequence is a Trump-like candidate. He is an emergent phenomenon, not a created one. He understands the concerns of your voters and articulates them better and more bluntly than you do.

5. You know that he's not actually going to deport 11 million people or build a wall

You've been told that he sees these proposals as a vehicle to get elected. (He is, after all, a cynical creature). You know he's going to try and forge a comprehensive solution on immigration. It may not work, and he sure as hell seems like the worst possible forger of that compromise, but it's hard to see the party alienating people any more than it already has. Your martyrdom will not, in that instance, matter a whit.

So, in the end, I think you'll find a way to live with Donald Trump. But don't worry: You won't be asked to love him.

Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from Thursday's Fox News Channel debate was treated like a bombshell, a surprise move from a candidate who has patented the mid-week swerve. But it was entirely predictable.

Trump draws attention for two reasons. The content of his pronouncements are often out of bounds, violations of the staid conventions of American political discourse. But the way he makes them — the medium — is just as important. "He is a constant disrupter of narrative," said Nicco Mele, a Los Angeles-based content strategist and entrepreneur.

Today, Mele notes, campaigns derive momentum from the passions around a moment in time as much as they do from narratives. This fits nicely with the way we consume media today. It rejects the longer, slower thinking associated with a traditional narrative, a narrative of the way a race is supposed to go, or the story a person is supposed to represent. Trump is a man of moments and instant gratification. If the pronouncements don't connect together to form a coherent whole, so what? Voters, at least for now, seem to eat it up.

"By announcing that he will not debate, Trump likely will dominate news coverage and deny Ted Cruz and other opponents a face-to-face confrontation before Iowa Republicans go to caucus," noted TheWashington Post.

"Our ability to create a plan — much less follow through on it — is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail at any moment," he writes.

Our present, mediated by the Internet, is a haze of conflicting claims, narratives, and demands on our time and attention. Trump has figured out — or just intuitively gets — that to control this race, he has to keep our attention constantly. He cuts through the haze.

Connect that to his basic message — I will bring us out of this weird, aggrieved present — and Trump has all the narrative he needs.

Trump's opponents hope that voters will move away from the present when they move into the privacy of the ballot booth. Their perspective turns prospective. They'll be thinking, again, in narratives. That might give the candidates with an established story an advantage. But we shall see.

One candidate for president of the United States has devoted decades of her life to the goal — a never-ending 30-years-long campaign for power and respect. Another adheres so strongly to a set of beliefs that he calls himself a socialist long after it's lost its cool. Another fashions himself as a redeemer of a lifetime’s worth of conservative grievances, risking social isolation and the faith and credit of the United States to make a point.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who more or less has nothing to lose. Trump, who started the race as a rich man’s lark, who probably never thought he had a strong chance to win, place, or show, who doesn’t have to spend much money to keep going, can more or less say anything he wants because he has nothing to fear. He has the least to lose and the most to gain.

More than his showman’s instinct for working a room, more than his ability to disrupt narratives with a single tweet, and even more than his unique New York patter, the most dangerous thing about him, from the perspective of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Ted Cruz, is that he alone can run as if he has nothing lose, because he doesn’t, and they cannot. He can say whatever is on his mind, Bullworth-esque, because the risks are minimal. The others must still calibrate their messages carefully, because they’ve invested their lives in a cause.

The following thought experiment comes courtesy of Penn Jillette, whose insight about Trump’s fearlessness (in a non-boozy, real-food fueled conversation I had with him and director Andy Lerner last week), prompted this post. (Jillette discussed our thoughts on his Penn's Sunday School podcast yesterday).

Let’s say you were part of the tiny cabal that controls American politics, and you were to come to Hillary Clinton and propose, in exchange for dropping her candidate’s mask, she’d have a 50 percent greater chance of becoming president if she were to admit that, of all the people involved in her husband’s Oval Office affair, Monica Lewinsky has handled herself with the most grace and courage and deserves a lot better than she’s gotten.

Let’s say that the cabal proposed to Bernie Sanders that it could guarantee he’d become president if only he would agree to ease up on Wall Street.

Let’s say that the cabal proposed to Trump that it would make him president if only he agreed to drop his proposal to build a wall around the United States and instead focus on creating an immediate pathway to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already living here.

Trump would take the deal. The others would not.

And that tells you all you need to know about the presidential race after the nomination.

On the one side there's a candidate who intuitively understands the currency of power now. We are living in the era of Douglas Rushkoff’s “present shock,” where moments are worth more than narrative. This candidate, again, has not a thing to lose by shooting off at the mouth.

On the other, there are candidate with everything to lose. One has a narrative, but no mastery of the present moment. Another is searching for a narrative, and can’t find one. They still calibrate Tweets. They still think they deserve the presidency based on merit and qualification.

One of these candidates is going to win the infinitely iterative virtual news cycle, and it’s not going to be the Democratic nominee.

If Trump’s popularity turns out to be more than just a big in-joke, a prank played by a frustrated electorate on the elites, then the best way to run against him would be to undercut his core appeal. As he tells the truth in the moment, so should you. As Trump has nothing to lose, act as if you has nothing to lose.

Right now, I don’t see either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders changing so fundamentally.

I do see another billionaire begin to leak word that he might be interested in the presidency, a guy who has Trump’s fascinating combination of fearlessness and pettiness, but who inhabits the role of a billionaire philanthropist so thoroughly that he masks guilelessness with a charming indifference. This is a guy who can tell the truth (as he sees it) and who has nothing to lose.

And now I’m beginning to understand why Michael Bloomberg might suddenly think that, in this age of moments, his moment is now.

It is a mistake of historians and biographers to ascribe to a person one particular motive force, and then attribute every subsequent action of theirs to that personality trait. In politics, we compound this error by insisting that politicians act only or primarily because they want to get re-elected.

Now, of course we all suffer from imposter syndrome, which is the fear that our true level of capability will be exposed and our ability to BS our way out of tough situations will only get us so far.

But Trump has got it really bad.

1. He regularly and repeatedly insists that he is the most brilliant person, has the best memory, the greatest ideas; people who are relatively secure do not need to tell others that they are great, but people who are not secure have to cover a 10-foot gap with a 100-foot bridge, so afraid are they that what they actually have to say is exposing some fundamental flaw. Trump's use of superlatives belies a rather profound sadness. He desperately NEEDS you to know that he is right.

2. Forget about the financial braggadocio; Trump insists he's smart because he went to Wharton. He says this whenever someone questions his judgment. "I went to the Wharton School of Business. I'm, like, a really smart person," is one common formulation.

It's an axiom: When you have to cite your credentials, you're afraid that people are discounting them. Wharton is an Ivy; Trump earned his way into the school, at least partly; if he was truly stupid, even his father's reputation wouldn't have gotten him in all the way. So getting into Wharton represents something real that Trump accomplished (more or less) by himself. That's his first line of defense, mind you, when someone questions his ideas.

3. Sudden bursts of brashness. I get that Trump likes attention — we all do — and wants to be the loudest voice in the room — again, that's not abnormal — and that he understands how to manipulate news cycles. But there's a deeper reason for his instant recipe policies: He needs the approval of his crowds. It fortifies him against charges that he is empty, dumb, lucky, or a daddy's boy.

Very fortunately for Trump, a large number of his supporters validate him because they are hypersensitive to sleights against their own status and position in society right now. They're Christians under attack from secularists; Americans under attack from Muslims; conservatives under attack from their leadership in Congress; white people under attack from minorities; middle-class people under attack from poor people who are slurping up government services at their expense. Like Richard Nixon's "bundle of resentments" (Rick Perlstein's phrase), Trump's bundle of insecurities serve the interests of his potential voters right now.

These are just the macronutrients in Trump's brew. His penchant for insults — particularly physical insults — is not something that secure people do. Even mean, secure people do not gratuitously insult someone's appearance because they disagree with them. Mean, insecure people do because they instinctively know how powerful those insults can be, and how they can deflect attention from the flaws of the person who makes them.

4. They surround themselves with sycophants who pantomime their method of relating to other people.

Donald Trump is just not very comfortable with being Donald Trump. His insecurity is not universal; he does not seem to be terribly obsessed with his hair, or his looks; he doesn't seem to care about being labeled a bigot or a racist. What he cares about is being seen as smart enough, as someone who worked hard to make it where he has made it.

We live in an age of uber epistemic closure, and I think that helps explain why the political world has been torn asunder as it tries to even explain the enduring strength of Donald J. Trump.

The phrase "epistemic closure" is a philosophical concept; it was brought outside the lecture halls and into conversation by Julian Sanchez in 2010 to refer to the tendency of a political group's members — in that case, conservatives — to derive significant and even existential benefit from their own contained universe of assumptions, facts, and ideas. Correspondingly, they exhibit a willfulness to reject and derive energy from the automatically "wrong" and other-wordly ideas and facts emanating from another political group.

People who practice epistemic closure make the error of assuming that everyone right believes as they do, and so people who believe differently are not just wrong — they are dangerous.

(Related phenomena include the tendency of conspiracy believers to discount facts and logic that disprove their theory by creating an even more elaborate theory to account for disconfirming evidence and for confirmation bias, where we generally throw out acts that cause us cognitive dissonance).

Trump's rise has occasioned a debate between two sets of political actors who approach the subject with a sort of certainty that borders on panic, the exact combination of traits that signals to outsiders that some sort of epistemological crisis is ongoing.

Both groups believe that Trumpism is, for lack of a better word, a passing fad.

The first group consists of Republican-affiliated political consultants and almost everyone who has made money off the conventional historical progression of GOP presidential races — perhaps even the entire "establishment" of the party as currently constituted. To them, it is inconceivable that the universe they live in could simultaneously include the party that they knew and the party that they see — the party that is currently giving Donald Trump significant and enduring support in statewide and national polls.

Stuart Stevens, a legitimately well-regarded consultant, tweeted this Monday, in response to a liberal writer's attachment of the "frontrunner" adjective to Trump: "I'd suggest no one is really a frontrunner until voting begins. We'd have the Clinton/Rudy/Perry/Newt etc. parties."

This is true as a statement of caution — but here is the "but:"

Trump's rise either caused or coincided with a large increase in the percentage of people who are paying attention to presidential races early. Just look at those debate ratings!

There is no reason to believe that there is enough history even to make the comparison. Just because the markers of a presidential contest are the same does not make the developments, pace, and even structure of the race like other races. Every year could be different; most years aren't because the GOP has exerted some measure of control over the nomination calendar to prevent apostates from taking over.

In 2012, the year Stevens' candidate won the nomination, he did so after a primary season had seriously damaged his party; Mitt Romney was not able to rescue it, and activist conservatives, though they voted for Romney at crunch time, ensured that Romney had to craft an identity that was not entirely his own.

Romney was saved by the GOP calendar, which was constructed by insiders to give conservatives a sense that they have true power — they frontload key primaries that "reflect" different types of party conservatives — but actually preserves the decisive role of the party's financiers and benefactors by ensuring that the type of Republicans who have actual voting power tend to reflect less threatening viewpoints. Conservatives, of course, realize this, to some degree or another. It is one reason — just one — why Trump is so popular today.

I can understand why, for many, many Republicans, the idea that Donald Trump is a real frontrunner who reflects real voters in their party is upsetting. It appears, though, that Trump truly does. He is not a resume conservative: He is a leader who is calling for restricting immigration by building a wall, he fights with the liberal media and the GOP establishment daily, and acts like he always wins; he legitimates the sense of persistent cultural threat that many activist conservatives have been feeling for years without — and this is important — compromising to the alleged realities of American politics or the niceties that give off the foul wind of eventual compromise. Perhaps because he is so obviously disdainful of the party — and so obviously incapable of submitting to its prerogatives — he is on the verge of consolidating the support of those conservatives who feel like everyone else is likely to sell out, because they always do.

My other candidate for epistemic closers are the quants: The people who keep telling us that the only thing that ultimately matters is who wins, and that it is irresponsible of the media (because we don't look at the numbers properly) to focus on the pre-primary pageantry. David Weigel had a great riposte to this universe: The winners matter, but the history matters more.

The story of an election is far, far bigger than the story of who won it. The Trump drama, and the movement that has discovered and elevated him as its candidate, is obviously the political news story of 2015. Actually, it's the latest in a long, semi-tragic history of primary campaigns that revealed plenty without producing a nominee. You can start the clock in 1964, when then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace ran for president for the first (of four) times. He had no chance of defeating President Lyndon B. Johnson in the primaries, but where he competed, he scored margins that baffled the political establishment. [The Washington Post]

The same goes for Ronald Reagan in 1976, and Howard Dean in 2004.

This world — which is a world I respect for many reasons — feels uncomfortable with its lack of data and lack of what statisticians might call priors: reliable protocols to conditionally evaluate the probability of an end state becoming true. But I think many reporters are rediscovering that campaigning is a verb, just as Republican establishmentarians have discovered that their control of the party is not nearly as strong as they hoped it was.

In the end, the GOP primary calendar is still set up — rigged — to elect someone who does not fit Trump's profile. But even when (if?) they do, it will be Trump's party they are inheriting.

Contradictions abound in the available data about America's gun violence epidemic. The numbers do not point to one clear trend. They do not really tell us whether we are managing risk any better. They are confusing. They often contradict the confident assertions made by partisans. There is plenty of fruit to cherry pick.

So what do we actually know?

The first thing to know is that violent crime of all types is down. In the United States, there are half as many gun homicides today as there were in 1997.

Why? Steven Pinker has a number of theories that try to bridge the gap between psychology, evolution, and criminology. More (and better, but more aggressive) policing has helped; new technology like cell phones make it easier for people to get help when they're shot, easier for police to track criminals, easier for emergency room doctors to more effectively treat gunshot wounds. The decline in the use of lead, which, it seems, fritzes the brain of people who grow up with it in their walls, probably helped too.

But wait. Black people are killed by guns at twice the rate of white people, and more than twice the rate of Latinos.

Do existing gun laws help? Maybe. Between 1994 and 2012, according to stats provided by Igor Volsky of Think Progress, 2.4 million fugitives, felons, and domestic violence perpetrators were stopped by background checks from purchasing weapons. On the other hand, the Government Accountability Office found that 1,300 people whose potential connections to terrorism were deep enough to get them watchlisted were able to buy guns; 90 percent passed the FBI background check.

But most Americans don't think gun laws make much of a difference, anyway.

And half see the right to bear arms as being under threat now. This number has been growing steadily, according to a Washington Post analysis of the data. And 57 percent of Americans think that stricter gun laws would empower the federal government to a dangerous degree.

Ideological polarization has increased; more Republicans now oppose gun laws, while the percentage of Democrats who feel one way or the other has stayed relatively constant.

Guns are everywhere. There are 300 million of them in circulation in America, which translates to about 88 guns for every 100 people. Unless Americans are naturally more violent than Europeans and Australians, the presence of so many guns is the main reason why, despite the decline in gun violence, America remains so much more violent than other countries with high standards of living.

What percentage of gun deaths comes from mass shootings versus gang/drug violence or domestic violence situations? A fairly tiny fraction. Miniscule, even. Slightly more than one percent, Terrorism? Less than one half of one percent.

The plurality of gun deaths are suicides, Vox notes. And yes: Living in a household with guns makes it far more likely that you'll become a victim. Accidentally killing someone else with a gun accounts for a little less than two percent of all gun deaths each year.

The San Bernardino massacre has produced a spasm of commentary and intense emotions, a new form of prayer shaming, a presidential speech, and, of course, naked bigotry.

What it has not produced is self-reflection. When we ask, "When are we going to get it?" we usually mean, "When is everyone who doesn't believe in the same things we do going to see the world the way we do?"

As depressing as it is to read the same laments and shouts about how:

Thou shalt not politicize tragedies!

Shootings are atrocities, not tragedies.

We can never know why human beings do these things.

We're never going to be able to confiscate guns from everyone, so it's hopeless.

Our hearts and prayers are with the victims.

Because we can't see what could be done, we shouldn't do anything new.

It's more depressing to realize that we repeat ourselves because we fail to subject our own perspectives to the same scrutiny.

Here are 15 questions I think we all need to ask:

1. To those who oppose gun control: Why wouldn't nationwide restrictions on ammunition purchases along with mandatory government notification of purchases above a certain level make it more difficult for people to stockpile ammunition? How would that not deter at least a small percentage of mass shootings and gang/drug violence? And if it would indeed save lives, or even if it might, what are the policy reasons not to experiment with ammunition restrictions?

2. White, non-Muslim Americans are far more likely to die by the gun of another white non-Muslim American than to fall victim to any sort of terrorist attack perpetrated by Muslims, ever, so how could anyone not find a headline like this: "Antidote offered to Muslim carnage: More Guns" — over a favorable citation of a piece I wrote yesterday about mass shootings — to be willfully, almost dangerously bigoted?

3. If it is true that a neighbor of the home used by Syed Farook to stockpile ammunition and bombs took note of suspicious activities and decided not to inform the police because they did not want to racially profile, doesn't that mean that the neighbor was comfortable privately racially profiling the Syeds already, and didn't want to bring sanction to his own prejudice by acting on that information? Should the neighbor be lauded for checking his bias? Or do we need a different conversation about racial profiling? Further, if the neighbor noticed the same type of suspicious conduct coming from two gingers from Britain, would he have called the police? If the answer to the latter question is "yes," then is there a better way to balance the tradeoffs?

4. Are anonymous terrorism tip lines likely to produce too much information for authorities to make efficient use of them, given the propensity of people to see into the void certain patterns that, when associated with people who are Muslim, make them more likely to call in, knowing that no one will think they are bigots?

5. In a society where we rightly cherish our freedom to be mean, to be rude, to complain loudly, and even to praise our enemies, is an intelligence signal-to-noise problem inevitable? We're learning that in Europe, intelligence agencies have far, far too many people to actually surveil with any degree of fidelity given the basic "threat" threshold. Can free societies realistically expect to prevent all or most mass terrorist attacks when the plot is confined to a relatively small group of people living together?

6. What do gun control advocates have to show for the billions of dollars they've spent over the past 30 years? Without questioning their motivations, is it time for people who support gun control to demand radical new approaches?

7. If the proximate goal of gun control advocates is to reduce the effects of gun violence in the near term, what would you say to temporary solutions that would lead to more civilians or security guards being trained to use firearms (along with a corresponding reduction, in, say, available ammunition)?

8. Don't those who are quick to characterize attacks like the San Bernardino massacre as "terrorism" and therefore of an entirely different character than the Columbine school shootings have a duty to explain exactly, from a policy perspective, what the difference is to the victims of the shootings, and propose different solutions for both?

9. What good does it to call Islamic terrorism "Islamic terrorism" and then do nothing else?

10. What harm does it do to NOT call terrorism clearly inspired by Islamic theology (or a variant of it) that millions of people around the world tell pollsters they adhere to, terrorism that is inspired by a variant of Islamic theology that millions of people around the world believe in?

11. What are the differences between terrorism as perpetrated by al Qaeda and terrorism that is inspired by the Islamic State? Is there literally a single thing the United States can possibly do in the near term to solve the "lone wolf" conundrum without (a) unduly and immorally persecuting innocent Muslims OR (b) offending many Muslims around the world as a matter of policy?

12. Don't those who are quickest to condemn Islam after these attacks have an ethical responsibility to take extra steps to call out anti-Muslim bigotry?

13. When it comes to specifically debating guns, ammunition, and registration policies, why does it matter why Syed and Tashfeen committed these atrocities?

14. Is it possible to address the San Bernardino massacre comprehensively without addressing, forthrightly, both radicalization, and anti-Muslim sentiments?

15. And finally, shouldn't the following six statements from writer Ali A. Rivzi form the basis for all civil conversation about this subject?

"Day-to-day gun violence is more deadly than Islamic terrorism right now because it has killed many more people."

"Islamic terrorism is more deadly than day-to-day gun violence, because if it actually succeeds in its stated goals (such as obtaining weapons of mass destruction as ISIS wants to do), it will kill millions more."

"Islamic terrorism is the most deadly form of terrorism in the world today."

"Anyone who is mentally disturbed or disgruntled and shoots up his school or workplace is a criminal, but is not a terrorist — even if he's Muslim."

"All Islamic terrorists are Muslim."

"The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, and should not have to apologize for the few that are."

The last time I wrote about a mass shooting, I decided to publicize an argument made by a group of gun control advocates who were insanely frustrated at the sclerosis within their own movement. Their idea: Focus on the ammo. Bullets are perishable. Laws to restrict and monitor mass ammo purchases might deter some (though certainly not all) potential shooters, and it would also have a real effect in poor, non-white communities where gun violence is the norm, not the exception.

It was clear to me, as it should be clear to everyone today, that these tweeted-and-televised atrocities, even as they become more common, do not change the laws of political physics that constrain the gun control debate to two highly caricatured, unproductive dimensions. Because there is no realistic way to confiscate guns, and because the right to buy guns is, for better or worse, enshrined within the Constitution and was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in its Heller decision, guns are not going to disappear.

The question for everyone then becomes: Given these constraints, what's the most critical, time-sensitive policy outcome? Fewer guns? Or fewer mass shootings? Or fewer people dying during of mass shootings?

It is tempting to lump all gun violence together and then reason outwardly from there, but I fear that in doing so, we close ourselves to avenues of progress because we're addicted to the self-righteousness we associate with our own side.

Is the epidemic of gun violence in cities like Chicago in most ways similar to mass shootings perpetrated at random? Do we have a coherent theory of how they're both linked to police violence? If we don't, then what good does it do us to draw our conclusions from the highest-level abstractions we can muster? Yes, American history bleeds red from guns. Yes, human beings can become brutally violent. Yes, I am absolutely interested in talking about the nexus between certain types of mental illness and violence, and between violence and evil, and between evil and guns.

I am more interested in figuring out ways to reduce the number of innocent people killed, right now.

Even with the NRA's stranglehold on politics, we can instruct the CDC to research guns and violence and public health, and we can (and should) use existing laws to prevent people with certain mental illnesses from buying them, and we absolutely must — must — create a social safety net fot the mentally ill in general. All of that we should do, today. We all say this every time we see a mass shooting.

The police are not likely to respond to a mass shooting quickly enough to save lives. In San Bernardino, a SWAT team was training nearby, and three suspects still managed to escape.

Ordinary people who volunteer to carry guns, who would receive significant and regular training from the government, might be in a position to intervene. I've always wondered why this suggestion is immediately ridiculed; properly trained citizens can serve as a deterrent if bad guys know that they might encounter them, and in some circumstances they might also be able to subdue or kill the attackers before they can kill dozens of people at will.

It's the "at will" part that bothers me. It always has. Why do people who support restrictive gun control — and I count myself as someone who does — mock the notion that, in some circumstances, particularly and exclusively at locations where lots of people gather to work, play, or live, having a few highly trained, armed good guys shooting back at the bad guys might be an option worth exploring?

It is absolutely consistent to believe that anyone who buys a gun should be subject to an extensive background check, should undergo some sort of standardized training, must be re-certified, and must register their firearms with the state... and also believe that it would be nice to have more of these people around when bad people start shooting randomly.

I would love for guns to vanish, but I do not live in a world where guns will vanish.

I would love for more restrictive guns laws to be passed, but I do not live in a world where the politics will allow such laws to be passed.

Most of all, I want to reduce the number of people who die from mass shootings. I think it is ethically and morally imperative to prioritize the saving of life.

I understand the basic objections to this idea. There will be accidents. Innocents might get caught in the crossfire. More guns in one place induces a measure of disgust. Police need to be able to distinguish between armed civilians and bad guys.

But I don't really understand why, if workplaces have fire wardens and people trained to give colleagues CPR and people who tell us where we should hide during earthquakes, we shouldn't also have colleagues who are specifically trained to respond to people who might attack us, too? (Security guards are there for that purpose, you say, and I say yes: Let's arm them, standardize and increase their training, and stop denigrating their profession. Make them more than rent-a-cops. Never use that phrase again.)

Until someone invents a technology that allows ordinary people without guns to subdue people with guns, we don't have many options if the immediate goal is to save lives. Which, in this case, I think it should be.

A freshly declassified report confirms that the U.S. intelligence community, in 1983 and 1984, gave insufficient weight to evidence that the leaders of the Soviet Union genuinely feared a surprise nuclear missile attack from the West, misinterpreted Kremlin pronouncements as propaganda, and, most critically, failed to provide warning about significant changes to Soviet military and intelligence postures in the wake of "Able Archer '83." That 10-day NATO exercise in November of 1983 is suspected of unintentionally and quietly pushing America and the Soviet Union closer to war. And now, there's new evidence suggesting those suspicions were right on.

Released last week by FOIA's de-facto court of appeals, the 109-page report (read it below), prepared in 1990, offers a searing indictment of the American intelligence community. And its publication, long anticipated by Cold War historians, may open old wounds.

For the past few years, I've been working on a book about Able Archer for Simon and Schuster. My basic question: Was whatever happened during that exercise real enough to deserve the term "war scare"? Did the U.S. and the Soviet Union move closer to the brink without realizing it?

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board report is as official an answer as we can get from the U.S. government : Yes. The Able Archer war scare was real.

Able Archer '83 — a very realistic military exercise that spanned much of Western Europe — was held just weeks before the planned deployment of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Europe, and two months after a jittery Soviet air defense force shot down a civilian airliner. Some degree of heightened Kremlin anxiety to Western war rehearsals was expected — and, in the minds of the planners of these war games, unavoidable.

As it turns out, the anxiety level was considerably higher than almost anyone believed was possible. For more than a decade, historians and reporters have debated one major question: Did the Soviets sincerely believe that the U.S. would use a military exercise like Able Archer as cover to launch some sort of first strike on the Soviet Union? Or, was the heightened anxiety part of an elaborate deception to gain concessions when (and if) arms control talks resumed?

The vast intelligence-gathering sensors of the Soviet Union had turned up to indications that the West was planning a nuclear attack. Because the nexus of world events had shifted against the Soviet Union, President Reagan would find a way to exploit their vulnerabilities and undertake some sort of grand empirical adventure — maybe an invasion to save Poland, or even a surgical decapitation attack against the Soviet leadership itself.

Robert Gates, who was deputy director for intelligence at the CIA at the time, told me earlier this year that he regards the downgrading of Soviet war fears as a major intelligence failure. (He has elaborated on this subject in a book). Several Reagan administration officials, including Bud McFarlane, the president's national security adviser at the time, contend that President Reagan's response upon learning that there was even a possibility that the Soviet leadership was that paranoid helped convince him to pursue diplomacy more aggressively, and saber-rattling, less so. But the author of early CIA reports, Fritz Ermarth, contends that hindsight bias makes it easy to second-guess the CIA, and insists that it far overstates the case to say that the world moved closer to actual conflict.

But according to the declassified PFIAB report, there was a consistent body of evidence suggesting this fear was widespread, and that the unusual nature of Able Archer magnified it.

The Soviet military put itself on alert status during Able Archer, and ended it as Able Archer ended; the intelligence community missed this at the time.

Air defense brigades in Warsaw Pact countries were placed on alert; the CIA dismissed this at the time as standard counter-exercising.

Nuclear weapons were transported from storage units to their forward deployed positions.

The Soviets conducted a significantly larger number of reconnaissance flights over NATO territory during Able Archer than during any other similarly measured time period.

The Soviets increased their readiness and alert levels force-wide. (This ended as Able Archer ended, too).

Air traffic in the Soviet Union was suspended during the exercise too.

The PFIAB report gives weight to the reports of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB agent who spied for Britain, and who reported in early 1984 on Soviet fears about the war scare.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive at George Washington University has written at length about Able Archer, and his primers are worth reading for the full background. Jones also superintended the process to push the document through a mandatory declassification review.

But the upshot of these recently declassified documents is clear: There was a major nuclear war scare in 1983. And American intelligence officials missed it.

The first Democratic presidential debate had one casualty: a plausible reason why Vice President Joe Biden should enter the race.

That's because Hillary Clinton deftly argued that President Obama's decision to hire her as secretary of state was all that Democrats needed to know about her judgment, and that it should put to rest questions about her vote in favor of the war on Iraq and her late embrace of financial populism.

Trust Obama, she was saying, and you can trust me. The crowd at the Wynn hotel and casino in Las Vegas, at least, bought it.

She got a big assist from Bernie Sanders, of course, when he drew huge applause by urging everyone to forget about the "damn emails" and focus on income inequality. Clinton's favorability ratings have fallen since she left the State Department in 2013, partly because an insurgent has emerged to remind anti-establishment Democrats that they have a choice, and partly because she has seemed unsteady in response to questions about her private email server. She needed a strong performance on Tuesday to remind Democrats what they once liked about her, and she delivered.

Going forward, Clinton's donor base will be mollified. Her supporters will be ecstatic. And the rest of the party will see her as a very plausible nominee.

Where, in this mix, can Joe Biden fit? What interests would his candidacy serve, aside from his own?

Biden's candidacy only works on the theory that Clinton is hemorrhaging support, or that her status as frontrunner is shaky, or that she seems unable to articulate a message capable of defeating an emboldened, excited Republican Party in the general election. On Tuesday, her preparation and experience, set against a rather underwhelming cohort of debaters, shows that none of these three conditions is operative.

Clinton still has not fully fleshed out an answer to the toughest question facing her campaign: Aside from her being a Clinton and a woman, why should she be president? But she may be getting there. Fathers being able to tell their daughters that "you, too, will be able to be president," is as close as she has to a reason, and it's compelling. Sufficient? No. "I'm a progressive who likes to get things done," which she said earlier, is closer.

Sanders has drawn significant stylistic contrasts with Clinton, but the premise for his campaign is self-referential too. He spoke of the house parties his campaign was holding, and of the millions of dollars he's raised from small donors, and of the need to "raise the consciousness" of the public at large by presenting it with the facts about income inequality. Sanders' pledge to "mobilize our people to take back our country from a handful of billionaires to create a vibrant democracy" is an applause line that builds its own ceiling.

As former Sen. James Webb said to Sanders, "The revolution isn't coming."